The Old Devils


Kingsley Amis


First published in 1986

Winner of that year's Booker Prize


AUTHOR'S NOTE


Many real places are referred to in this novel (Carmarthen, Cowbridge) and many fictitious ones too (Birdarthur, Caerhays).

Lower Glamorgan corresponds to no county division. The fictitious places are not real ones in disguise or under pseudonyms: anybody trying to go from the coast of South Wales to Courcey Island, for instance, would soon find himself in the Bristol Channel. Courcey and the others have no more actual existence than any of the characters here portrayed.

K. A.

Swansea: London


One - Malcolm, Charlie, Peter and Others


1


'If you want my opinion,' said Gwen Cellan-Davies, 'the old boy's a terrifically distinguished citizen of Wales. Or at any rate what passes for one these days. '

Her husband was cutting the crusts off a slice of toast. 'Well, I should say that's generally accepted.'

'And Reg Burroughs is another after his thirty years of pen-pushing in first City Hall and later County Hall, for which he was duly honoured.'

'That's altogether too dismissive a view. By any reckoning Alun has done some good things. Come on now, fair play.'

'Good things for himself certainly: _Brydan's Wales__ and that selection, whatever it's called. Both still selling nicely after all these years. Without Brydan and the Brydan industry, Alun would be nothing. Including especially his own work - those poems are all sub-Brydan.'

'Following that trail isn't such a bad - '

'Goes down a treat with the Americans and the English, you bet. But... ' Gwen put her head on one side and gave the little frowning smile she used when she was putting something to someone, often a possible negative view of a third party, 'wouldn't you have to agree that he follows Brydan at, er, an altogether lower level of imagination and craftsmanship?'

'I agree that compared with Brydan at his best, he doesn't - '

'You know what I mean.'

In this case Malcolm Cellan- Davies did indeed know.

He got up and refilled the teapot, then his cup, adding a touch of skimmed milk and one of the new sweeteners that were supposed to leave no aftertaste. Back in his seat at the breakfast-table he placed between his left molars a small prepared triangle of toast and diabetic honey and began crunching it gently but firmly. He had not bitten anything with his front teeth since losing a top middle crown on a slice of liver-sausage six years earlier, and the right-hand side of his mouth was a no-go area, what with a hole in the lower lot where stuff was always apt to stick and a funny piece of gum that seemed to have got detached from something and waved disconcertingly about whenever it saw the chance. As his jaws operated, his eyes slid off to the _Western Mail__ and a report of the Neath-Llanelli game.

After lighting a cigarette Gwen went on in the same quirky style as before, 'I don't remember you as a great believer in the integrity of Alun Weaver as an embodiment of the Welsh consciousness?'

'Well, I suppose in some ways, all the television and so on, he is a bit of a charlatan, yes, maybe.'

'Maybe! Christ Almighty. Of course he's a charlatan and good luck to him. Who cares? He's good fun and he's unstuffy. We could do with a dozen like him in these parts to strike the fear of God into them. We need a few fakes to put a dent in all that bloody authenticity.'

'Not everybody's going to be glad to have him around,' said Malcolm, giving another section of toast the standard treatment.

'Well, that's splendid news. Who are you thinking of?'

'Peter for one. Funnily enough the' subject came up yesterday. He was very bitter, I was quite surprised. Very bitter.'

Malcolm spoke not in any regretful way but as if he understood the bitterness, even perhaps felt a touch of it on his own part. Gwen looked at him assessingly through the light-brownish lenses of her square-topped glasses. Then she made a series of small noises and movements of the kind that meant it was time to be up and away. But she sat on and, perhaps idly, reached out to the letter that had started their conversation and fingered it as it lay in front of her.

'It'll be, er, fun seeing Rhiannon again,' she said.

'M'm.'

'Been a long time, hasn't it? What... ten years?'

'At least that. More like fifteen.'

'She never came down with Alun on any of his trips after whenever it was. Just that once, or twice was it?'

'She used to come down to see her mother at Broughton, and then the old girl died about that long ago, so she probably... '

'I dare say you'd remember. I just thought it was funny she never really kept up with her college friends or anyone else as far as I know.'

Malcolm said nothing to that. He swayed from side to side in his chair as a way of suggesting that life held many such small puzzles.

'Well, she'll have plenty of time from now on, or rather from next month. I hope she doesn't find it too slow for her in these parts after London.'

'A lot of the people she knew will still be here.'

'That's the whole trouble,' said Gwen, laughing slightly.

She looked at her husband for a moment, smiling and lowering her eyelids, and went on, 'It must have come as a bit of a shock, the idea of, er, Rhiannon coming and settling down here after everything.'

'Call it a surprise. I haven't thought of her since God knows when. It's a long time ago.'

'Plenty of that, isn't there, nowadays? Well, this won't do. All right if I take first crack at the bathroom?'

'You go ahead,' he said, as he said every morning.

He waited till he heard a creak or so from the floor above, then gave a deep sigh with a sniff in the middle. When you thought about it, Gwen had given him an easy ride over Rhiannon, not forgetting naturally that it had been no more than Instalment I (a). A bit of luck he had been down first and had had a couple of minutes to recover from some of the shock-rightly so called - of seeing that handwriting on the envelope, unchanged and unmistakable after thirty-five years. Gwen had left the letter on the table. With a brief glance towards the ceiling he picked it up and reread it, or parts of it. 'Much love to you both' seemed not a hell of a lot to brag about in the way of a reference to himself, but there being no other he would have to make the best of it. Perhaps she had simply forgotten. After all, plenty had happened to her in between.

Finishing his tea, he lit his first and only cigarette of the day. He had never greatly enjoyed smoking, and it was well over the five years since he had followed his doctor's advice and given it up, all but this solitary one after breakfast which could do no measurable harm and which, so he believed, helped to get his insides going. Again as always he filled in time by clearing the table; it was good for him to be on the move. His bran flakes and Gwen's chunky marmalade enriched with whisky went into the wall-cupboard, the stones of his unsweetened stewed plums and the shells of her two boiled eggs into the black bag inside the bin. He thought briefly of eggs, the soft explosion as spoon penetrated yolk, the way its flavour spread over your mouth in a second. His last egg, certainly his last boiled egg, went back at least as far as his last full smoking day. By common knowledge the things tended to be binding, not very of course, perhaps only a shade, but still enough to steer clear of. Finally the crocks went into the dishwasher and at the touch of a button a red light came on, flickering rather, and a savage humming immediately filled the kitchen.

It was not a very grand or efficient dishwasher and not at all a nice kitchen. At Werneth Avenue, more precisely at the house there that the Cellan-Davieses had lived in until 1978, the kitchen had been quite splendid, with a long oak table you could get fourteen round with no trouble at all and a fine Welsh dresser hung with colourful mugs and jugs. Here there was nothing that could not have been found in a million cramped little places up and down the country, lino tiles, plastic tops, metal sink and, instead of the massive Rayburn that had warmed the whole ground floor at Werneth Avenue, an oval-shaped two-bar electric fire hanging on the wall. Most mornings at about this time Malcolm wondered if he had not cut down a bit too far by moving out here, but no point in fretting about that now, or later either.

There came a faint stirring in his entrails. He picked up the _Western Mail__ and without hurrying - quite important as a matter of fact - made his way to the slant-ceilinged lavatory or cloakroom under the stairs. The old sequence duly extended itself: not trying at all because that was the healthy, natural way, trying a certain amount because that could have no. real adverse effect, trying like a lunatic because why? - because that was all there was to do. Success was finally attained, though of a limited degree.

No blood to speak of, to be conscientiously classified as between slight and very slight. This, was the signal for him to sit to attention and snap a salute.

In the bedroom Gwen was at her dressing-table putting the foundation on her face. Malcolm came round the door in his silent, looming way and caught sight of her in the glass. Something about the angle or the light made him look at her more closely than usual. She had always been a soft, rounded, fluffy sort of creature, not ineffectual but yielding in her appearance and movements. That had not changed; at sixty-one - his age too - her cheeks and jaws held their shape and the skin under her eyes was remarkably supple. But now those deep-set eyes of hers had an expression he thought he had not noticed before, intent, almost hard, and her mouth likewise was firmly set as she smoothed the sides of her nose. Probably just the concentration - in a second she saw him and relaxed, a comfortable young-elderly woman with gently tinted light-brown hair and wearing a blue-and-white check trouser-suit you might have expected on someone slightly more juvenile, but not at all ridiculous on her.

To get her voice as much as anything he said, 'More social life? No letting up?'

'Just coffee at Sophie's,' she said in her tone of innocent animation.

'Just coffee, eh? There's a change now. You know it's extraordinary, I've just realized I haven't seen Sophie for almost a year. One just doesn't. Well. You'll be taking the car, will you?'

'If that's okay. You going along to the Bible?'

'I thought I might sort of look in.' He went along to the Bible every day of his life. 'Don't worry, I'll get the bus.' A pause followed. Gwen spread blusher - called rouge once upon a time - over her cheekbones. After a moment she dropped her hands into her lap and just sat. Then she speeded up. 'Well, and how are you this morning, good boy?'

'Perfectly all right, thank you.' Malcolm spoke more abruptly than he meant. He had prepared himself for a return to the topic of Rhiannon and the query about his bodily functions, though usual and expressed much as usual, caught him off balance. 'Quite all right,' he added on a milder note.

'Nothing... '

'No. Absolutely not.'

As he had known she would, she shook her head slowly. 'Why you just can't deal with it, an intelligent man like you. The stuff that's on the market nowdays.'

'I don't hold with laxatives. Never have. As you very well know.'

'Laxatives. Christ, I'm not talking about senna pods, California Syrup of Figs. Carefully prepared formulae, tried and tested. It's not gunpowder drops any more.'

'Anything like that, it interferes with the body's equilibrium. Distorts the existing picture. With chemicals.'

'I thought that was what you were after, Malcolm, honestly, distorting what you've got. And what about all those plums you go in for? Aren't they meant to distort you?'

'They're natural. Obviously.'

'How do you think they work? Just chemicals in another form.'

'Natural chemicals. Chemicals naturally occurring.'

'How do you think your guts distinguish between a bit of chemical in a plum and a bit of the same chemical in a pill or a capsule?'

'I don't know, love,' said Malcolm rather helplessly. He sought it was a bit thick for a man not to be able to win an argument about his own insides, even one with his wife. 'But then I haven't got to know.'

'Don't take my word for it - fix up to see Dewi. Yes yes, you don't hold with doctors either, and why do I have to go on at you. Because you're foolish, that's why, you won't help yourself. Unteachable. You know sometimes I'd almost take you for a bloody Welshman?'

'There's nothing to see Dewi about. There's nothing wrong with me. No sign, no sign of anything.'

'Just ask him for a prescription, that's all. Two minutes.' Malcolm shook his head and there was more silence. In a moment he said, 'Can I go now?'

They embraced lightly and carefully while Gwen made another set of little sounds. This lot meant that although she still thought her husband was silly about himself she would let it go for the time being. There was affection there as well, if not of an over-respectful order.

As often before, Malcolm could see strength in the case against ever having mentioned his defecations in the first place. He had never intended more than an occasional appeal for reassurance and so on. As an apparently irremovable part of the daily agenda the subject had its drawbacks, while remaining streets ahead of his shortcomings as a man, a husband, an understander of women, a provider and other popular items dimly remembered from the past.

In the bathroom across the landing he cleaned his teeth, first the twenty or so surviving in his head in one form or another and then the seven on his upper-jaw partial. This was such a tight fit that putting it back was always a tense moment; bending his knees and moving them in and out seemed to help. What with the five crowns in front, of varying manufacture and recency, the ensemble was a bit of a colour atlas, but at least no one was going to mistake it for snappers top and bottom. They would have to come some day - which meant not now, bless it. The thought of having a tooth extracted, loose as nearly all of his had become, bothered him in a way he thought he had outgrown many years before.

The face surrounding these teeth was in fair trim, considering. In shape it was rather long, especially between the end of the nose and the point of the chin, but the features themselves were good and he was aware without vanity that, with his height and erect bearing and his thatch of what had become reddish-grey hair, people usually found him presentable enough. At the same time he had noticed that now and then a stranger, usually a man, would glance at him in a way that always puzzled him rather, not quite hostile but with something unfavourable about it, something cold.

He had seen a good deal of that sort of glance at school, where he had been bullied more than his fair share for a boy not undersized, foreign or feeble, and he remembered asking Fatty Watkins, one of his leading persecutors, why this was so. Without thinking about it, Fatty had told him that he looked the type, whatever that might have meant. Twice in later life, once down Street's End on a Saturday night and then again on a train coming back from an international at Cardiff Arms Park, just minding his own business both times, he had been picked out of a group of mates and set upon without preamble by an unknown ruffian. Perhaps without intending it he sometimes took on an expression people misinterpreted as snooty or something.

Whatever the ins and outs of his face he was going to have to shave it. He hated the whole caboodle - teeth, shave, bath, hair, clothes - so much that he often felt he was approaching the point of jacking it all in completely and going round in just pyjamas and dressing-gown all day.

But for Gwen he would probably have got there long ago. She kept on at him to play himself through with the portable wireless and he still tried it occasionally, but he cared for chatter about as much as he cared for modem music, and that was about all there seemed to be apart from Radio Cymru, which was obviously just the thing if you were set on improving your Welsh. The trouble was they talked so fast.

Welsh came up again and in a more substantial form when, having heard Gwen drive away, he settled in his study to put in a bit of time there before going along to the Bible. This, the study, was on the first floor, a small, smudgy room where water-pipes clanked. Its dominant feature was a walnut bookcase that had not looked oversized at Werneth Avenue but had needed the window taking out to be installed here. One shelf was all poetry: a fair selection of the English classics, some rather battered, a few Welsh texts, all in excellent condition, and a couple of dozen volumes of English verse by twentieth-century Welshmen. One of these, not painfully slim, had on it Malcolm's name and the imprint of a small press in what was now Upper Glamorgan. On taking early retirement from the Royal Cambrian he had intended to set about a successor, completing poems left half done for years and years, writing others that had only been in his head or nowhere at all. He ought to have had the sense to know that intentions alone were no good in a case like this. Not a line had turned up in all that time. But some day one might, and meanwhile he must practise, exercise, try to get his hand back in. Hence the Welsh.

Among the books on his table there was a publication of the Early Welsh Text Society - to give its English designation: the poems and poetical fragments of Llywelyn Bach ab yr Ynad Coch _(ft__. 1310), open at his funeral-song for Cadwaladr, quite a substantial affair, three hundred lines odd. Malcolm's translation of the first two sections was there too, a lightly corrected manuscript, also a pamphlet containing the only other translation he knew of, done and published by a Carmarthen schoolmaster in the Twenties but in the style of fifty years earlier. Never mind - whatever it lacked as a piece of poetry it came in bloody handy as a crib.

Moving at half speed, Malcolm opened the Pamphlet now at the beginning. His glance shifted to and fro between the Welsh original of this passage and the two English versions, picking out words and phrases in either language that he felt he had never seen before: the tomb of the regal chieftain... red stallions... ye warriors of Gwynedd... I the singer, the minstrel heaps of Saxon slain... chaplet... hart... buckler …mead...

Malcolm jerked upright at the table. A great God-given flood of boredom and hatred went coursing through him. That, that stuff, fiddling about with stuff like that was not living, was not life, was nothing at all. Not after today's news. No indeed, poems were not made out of intentions. But perhaps they could come from hope.

He made to tear up his manuscript, but held his hand at the thought of the hours that had gone into it, and the other thought that he would go back to it another day and transform it, make something wonderful of it. For now, he could not sit still. Yet-if he left the house now he would be much too early, or rather a good deal, a certain amount too early. Well, he could get off the bus at Beaufoy and walk the rest of the way. On more of the same reasoning he went and gave his shoes a thorough polish; not much point hereabouts, agreed, but virtuous.

When he finally went out it was overcast with a bit of black, damp already, mild though, with a gentle breeze clearing the mist, typical Welsh weather. If you can see Cil Point it means rain later; if not, rain now. As he started down the hill he could see it, just, a dark-grey snout between the ranks of black slate roofs shining with moisture. Soon the bay began to open out below him, the sweep round to the west where coal had once been mined on the shore and inland along the coastal plain, and steel and tin-plate were still worked and oil refined, for the moment anyway, and behind all this, indistinct through the muck, the squarish mass of Mynydd Tywyll, second-highest peak in South Wales.

It was mid-morning in the week, and yet the pavements were crowded with people darting in ·and out of shops or just strolling along like holiday-makers- here, in February? Children and dogs ran from side to side almost underfoot. Crossing the road was no joke with all the cars and the motor-cycles nipping about. There was a queue at the 24 stop but, even so, nothing showed for a long time. Staff shortages, they said, recruitment down since the automatic-payment system had meant good-bye to days of plenty, when the conductor fiddled half the fare-money on the out-of-town part of the route and handed over half of it, or nearly, to the driver when they got to the garage. To save going round the end of the queue, youngsters on their way to the opposite corner kept breaking through it, always as if by pre-arrangement just in front of Malcolm.

The bus came. While he was climbing the litter-strewn steps his left ball gave a sharp twinge, on and off like a light-switch, then again after he had sat down. Nothing. Just one of the aches and pains that come and go. No significance. He would not always have taken such a summary line, in fact at one stage cancer of them, or one of them, had been among his leading special dreads, distinguished as it was by its very personal site and alleged virulence. There had even been the time when, after a day and most of a night of just about unremitting twinges on both sides, he had spent the dawn hours compiling in his head a draft list of books to take into hospital: mainly English poetry with one or two descriptive works about Wales, in English naturally. The following morning, by one of the most rapid and complete recoveries in medical history, the affection had vanished. So far so good, no further. But then he had read in the _Guardian__ that recent advances had put the survival rate for testicular tumours up to or above ninety per cent, and for the rest of that day he had felt twenty, thirty years younger, and something of that had never been quite lost.

Re1lecting on this and related matters took him past his stop and almost into Dinedor itself. With an air of transparent innocence that luckily escaped remark he got off by Paolo's Trattoria. Just round the corner was the Bible, more' fully the Bible and Crown, the only pub of that name in the whole of Wales. According to local antiquarians the reference was to a Cavalier toast, though research had failed to come up with a date earlier than 1920, some time after it had become safe to proclaim loyalty to the King's party in any or all of his dominions, even this one.

On the way in Malcolm's spirits lifted, as they always did at the prospect of an hour or more spent not thinking about being ill and things to do with being ill. It was still early, but not enough to notice.


2


'But uglier still is the hump that we get from not having enough to do. You know who said that?'

'No.'

'Kipling. Joseph Rudyard Kipling. He was usually right, you know. Had a way of being right. No use sitting about, he said, or frowsting by the fire with a book. Wonderful word, frowst, isn't it? Wonder what it comes from. Well anyway, the thing is, get out in the fresh air and take a bit of exercise. A brisk walk, two miles minimum, three preferab1e. No need for any of your sleeping pills after that. I haven't taken a sleeping pill since... Guess when I last took a sleeping pill.'

'No idea.'

'1949. That's when I last took a sleeping pill .1949. Morning, Malcolm. Another early bird.'

'Morning, Garth. Morning, Charlie. Now what can I get you?'

The two had nearly full glasses and declined, but the offer was standard arrivals' etiquette. Malcolm went and got himself a half of Troeth bitter at the hatch in the corridor,' the nearest place. During his absence, Garth Pumphrey let Charlie Norris know more about the benefits of exercise and the dispensability of sleeping pills. Charlie followed Garth's talk with only half his attention, if that, but he found it comforting. He knew that nothing Garth said would surprise him, and as he felt at the moment, which was very much how he felt every morning of his life at this hour, even a pleasant surprise, whatever that might be, would have been better postponed. He flinched a little when Malcolm reappeared more abruptly than he had bargained for.

'Ah, here we are,' said Garth cordially, holding out an arm by way of showing Malcolm to the chair at his side. 'There. I've been treating young Charlie to a highly authoritative lecture on the subject of health, physical and mental. My number one rule is never sit over a meal. Breakfast least of all. '

It was amazing, thought Malcolm to himself, how invariably and completely he forgot Garth when looking forward to or otherwise weighing up a visit to the Bible. Forgetting things like that was probably one of Nature's ways of seeing to it that life carried on. Like the maternal instinct.

'Of course, you know Angharad says I'm turning into a real old health bore - a notorious pitfall of age, she says.' In the ensuing silence Garth took a good pull at his drink, which looked like a rather heavy vin rosé but was really gin and Angostura. Then he shaped up to Malcolm in a businesslike way. 'You were quite a performer in days gone by, Malcolm, weren't you? Sorry, with the old racquet. Oh, I was saying earlier, I remember the way you used to bash that ball. Give it a devil of a pasting, you would. That serve of yours. Famous. Deservedly so.'

'Many years ago now, Garth.'

'Not so many as the world goes in our time. November 1971, that's when the old place finally closed its doors.' Garth referred to the Dinedor Squash Racquets Club, of which all three had been members since youth. 'The end of an era. You know you and I had a game in the last week very nearly. I took a proper clobbering as usual. You were really seeing them that evening. Then we had a drink after with poor Roger Andrews. Do you remember?'

'Yes,' said Malcolm, though he had forgotten that part, and Charlie nodded to show that he was still in the conversation.

'He seemed so full of life that time. And then what could it have been, six weeks after we started coming in here, eight at the outside, off he goes. Like that. Sitting just where you are now, Charlie.'

Malcolm remembered that part all right. So did Charlie.

Roger Andrews had been nothing out of the way, a building contractor of no more than average corruption, not even much of a good fellow, but his fatal collapse in the so-called saloon lounge of the Bible had had a durable effect, confirming the tendency of a group of ex-members of the defunct squash club to drop in regularly midday and in the early evening. Over the years the room had become a kind of relic or descendant of that club, its walls hung with inherited photographs of forgotten champions, teams, presentations, dinners, its tables bearing a couple of ugly old ashtrays that had escaped being sold or stolen when the effects of the DSRC were disposed of. The habitués had even acquired something of a prescriptive right to keep out intruders. The landlord of the Bible made no objection, in fact it suited him well enough to have up to a dozen or so comparatively well-behaved drinkers perpetually occupying the least convenient and agreeable corner of his premises. From time to time the old boys complained among themselves about the discomfort, but there they were, the dump was almost next door to the Club building, which was what had drawn them there in the first place, and in winter the genial host actually let them have the benefit of a small electric fire at no extra charge.

After a moment of reverie or premeditation Garth Pumphrey again turned his face on Malcolm, a dark serious lined face with a hint of subdued passion, an actor's face some might have called it. 'What exercise do you take these days, Malcolm?' he asked.

'Just about zero, I'm afraid.'

'Just about zero? A fellow of your physique. A natural athlete like you. Dear, dear.'

'Ex-natural athlete. I'm not going to start going on cross-country runs at my age.'

'I should hope not indeed, it's altogether too late for that.' Garth whistled breathily to himself and moved his hand crabwise along the table' in front of him. Then he said, 'Do you find you fancy your food all right? I hope you don't mind me asking, we're all old friends here.'

Charlie thought a distinction could be drawn between Garth's boasting about his own insides if he had to and his involvement with others', but he was not the man to put it into words. His second large Scotch and dry ginger was beginning to get to him and already he could turn his head without thinking it over first. Soon it might cease to be one of those days that made you sorry to be alive.

'No, that's all right, Garth,' Malcolm was saying gamely. 'No, my-trouble's all the other way. Keeping myself down to size.'

'Good, good.' Garth's small figure was huddled up in the cracked rexine chair, turned away from Charlie. He smiled and nodded. 'And, er... ' His eyebrows were raised.

In a flash Malcolm knew or as good as knew that the next second Garth was going to ask him about his bowel movements. He felt he would do, must do, anything at all to prevent that, and mentioned what he had not even considered mentioning, not there, not yet, not until he had hugged it to himself as long as he could. 'Alun and Rhiannon are moving down here in a couple of months,' he said quickly. 'Coming back to Wales to live.'

That did the trick. It took quite some time for Garth's incredulity to be mollified, likewise his craving for information. When that was done he explained that, what with being stuck out at Cape1 Mererid and so on, he had not known the couple in early years, but had met Alun many times on trips to these parts and anyway, he finished strongly, 'the bloke is a national figure, let's face it.'

'You face it,' said Charlie, who had reasons of his own to feel less than overjoyed at Malcolm's news. 'I realize he's on television quite a lot, though we don't usually get it in Wales, and when anyone wants a colourful kind of stage- Taffy view on this and that then of course they go to him. With a bit of eloquent sob-stuff thrown in at Christmas or when it's dogs or the poor. He's the up-market media Welshman. Fine. I can take him in that role, just about. But as for Alun Weaver the writer, especially the poet... I'm sorry.'

'Well, I'm no literary critic,' announced Garth. 'I'm just going by the general acclaim. I'm told they think highly of him in America. But we've got a writer here now.'

'Oh, no,' said Malcolm, embarrassed. 'Not in that sense.

Well, what can I say? It's true that a lot of his work falls under Brydan's shadow, but I see nothing very shameful in that. And there's more than that in it. I'm not saying he didn't get quite a bit from Brydan, but they were also both drawing on a common stock to rather different effect. Something like that.'

Charlie said with a bland look, 'Everything you say may well be true - it cuts no ice with me. Brydan, Alun, you can stick the lot. Take it away. Forget it.'

'Oh, Charlie,' Garth pleaded. 'Not Brydan. Not _Tales from the Undergrowth__. Known and loved all over the world as it is.'

'That in particular. Write about your own people by all means, don't be soft on them, turn them into figures of fun if you must, but don't patronize them, don't sell them short and above all don't lay them out on display like quaint objects in a souvenir shop.'

'I didn't realize you felt that strongly,' said Malcolm after a silence.

'I don't, I don't feel strongly at all. Not my field. But I do think if a chap decides to make a living out of being Welsh he'd better do it in a show on the telly. Which I think Alun realizes part of the time.'

'Oh dear.' Malcolm too seemed quite cast down. 'And you see that in the poetry, in Brydan's poetry too, do you?'

'Yes I do. What's that stuff about, er, the man in the mask and the man in the iron street. All he'd done was juggle two phrases about and had the Americans going on about childlike Welsh vision. Stark too it was, boyo. It's not serious enough, that kind of thing.'

Malcolm set about considering the justice of parts of this in his conscientious way. Soon Garth, who bad been looking anxiously from face to face, made a permission-to speak noise. Charlie nodded encouragingly at him.

'I was just going to say, what about, what about her? I have met her, of course I have, but I think only the once and long ago.'

'Well, what about her?' said Charlie. 'Just a very pleasant - '

'Rhiannon Rhys, as she was when I first met her,' said Malcolm fluently, raising himself in his seat like a panellist answering a question from the audience, 'was one of the most stunning-looking girls I've ever seen in my life. Tall, fair, graceful, beautiful complexion, grey eyes with just a hint of blue. An English rose, really. And a lovely nature - modest, unassuming. She made no attempt to be the centre of attraction, but she was, in any company. No, I haven't seen her for a long time either, and she may look a bit different now, but there are some things that don't change, not in thirty years. I'm glad she's coming back to Wales.'

Malcolm believed that he had on the whole said this in a conversational, down-to-earth way. Garth paid close attention. Charlie drained his glass for the second time, sucking fiercely to get the last couple of drops.

'Well, er,' said Garth, 'that sounds absolutely marvellous. Thank you, Malcolm. I'll look forward to renewing my acquaintance with, with Mrs Weaver.'

Before he had finished Charlie was urging Malcolm to have a real drink, assuring him that what he had before him was piss and getting up from the table. This was not as straightforward a procedure as might be thought, in view of the table itself and his chair and their respective legs, and his own bulk and state. On the way out of the room he gave a muffled cry of shock when the side of his heel bumped against the door-frame. By standing quite still for a moment and concentrating, however, he successfully avoided the hazard in the passage floor where for some years most of a tile had been missing. His shoulder grazed but did not dislodge a framed photograph on the wall showing a row of men in hats standing outside a thatched cottage in Ireland or some such place.

As he waited at the hatch for Doris to finish giving change for a couple of twenty-pound notes in the bar, Charlie thought about Malcolm's speech just now. Almost every phrase in it had been all right in itself, would have been, at least, if said in a different voice or eked out with a few oaths or perhaps seen written. It was the way the silly sod had looked and sounded so pleased with himself for having had no false shame about coming out with it that was what had called for a frantic personal exit headfirst through the closed window or, more prosaically, overturning the table in his lap. And that clear holy-man's gaze...

Doris ambled along and Charlie ordered a large pink gin, mentioning Garth's name, and three large Scotches and water. Down went one of the Scotches in its entirety while Doris was ringing up and right away the old feather duster twirled at the back of his throat and he was coughing his heart to bits, right there at maximum first go, roaring, bellowing like an imitation, in a crouch with his fists shoved into his guts, tears pawing down his face. A silence fell widely round him. When he tried to look he thought he saw somebody, several people, hobbledehoys, leaning over the bar· to peer. Doris gave him a glass of water and he sipped and breathed, then drank. With a great exhalation he straightened up and mopped his eyes, feeling now quite proud of himself, as if his well-known toughness and grit had got him through another testing external assault.

He had not yet touched the tray of drinks when the door banged at the end of the passage and a large lumpish figure creaked towards him through the gloom, recognizable after a moment as Peter Thomas, runner-up in the open tournament of the DSRC a couple of times in the 1940S but more of a golf man. Neither one nor the other these days, of course.

'Hallo, Peter. Early for you.'

'No, not really. Yes, I'll have a gin and slimline tonic.'

If Charlie Norris had ever been thought of as big and fat and red-faced, and some such description was hard to avoid, a revision of terminology might have been called for at the sight of his friend. Charlie's backside pushed the tail of his tweed jacket into two divergent halves, true, and his paunch forced the waistband of his trousers half-way down to his crotch, but Peter could have given him a couple of stone and still been the heftier, not so obviously from front or back where the cut of his suit tended to camouflage him, but to be seen in anything like profile as even thicker through than wide. And Charlie's cheeks and forehead were no more than ruddy compared with Peter's rich colouring. Their faces in general were different: Charlie's round and pug-nosed, with the look of a battered schoolboy, Peter's fine-featured, almost distinguished between the bulges and pouches. At the moment Charlie was smiling, Peter not.

'Well, how are you today?' asked Charlie. A duff question on second thoughts.

'How do you think? But as you see I can get out of the house. Who's in there?'

'Just Garth and Malcolm.'

Peter nodded and sighed, accepting it. His massive, bottom-heavy head turned sharply at a burst of laughter and jocular shouting from inside the bar. The voices sounded youthful. Frowning, he limped to the hatch and stuck his head round.

'According to Malcolm,' began Charlie, but stopped when the other turned back, speaking as he moved.

'I thought we were supposed to be in the middle of a depression. Have you looked in there? Three-quarters full, at this hour.' It was all coming out as if freshly minted. 'Most of them in their twenties or younger. Unemployed school-leavers, no doubt. Who'd be anything else these days if he had the chance, eh? What happens if we ever have a boom? They'll be falling down drunk from morning till night, presumably. Like the eighteenth century. You know, Hogarth.'

Charlie wanted to grin when Doris put the slimline on the tray next to the (large) gin. Talk about a drop in the ocean. Like an elephant going short of a banana, he thought. He also thought Peter looked distinctly fatter since he had last seen him, though admittedly this was doubtful after no more than a couple of days. Nor did he appear well. He had been breathing bard when he arrived and seemed to be sweating, though it was far from hot outdoors or in. High blood-pressure. Not good.

Still talking, he preceded Charlie down the passage. 'You should see the old bags coming out of the supermarkets with the goodies piled up on their trolleys like Christmas.' His hip thumped considerably into a table against the wall, agitating the leaves of the flowerless pot-plant that sprawled there. 'And I don't mean in the middle of town, I'm talking about wretched holes like Greenhill or Emanuel.' He opened the door of the lounge. 'And the point is you can't tell anybody. Nobody wants to know.'

Peter Thomas had to hold the door open because an ancient shoddiness of workmanship would have made it swing shut in a few seconds, and Charlie was much occupied with the tray after a pair of speedy over-corrections had nearly sent the stuff piling over opposite edges. At last they were in and settled and Garth had finished welcoming Peter.

A glance at Peter showed there was no more to come from that direction for the moment. Half to provoke him, Charlie said, 'Anybody happened to go by St Paul's recently? They're having fun there.'

Malcolm said, 'Are we talking about St Paul's Cathedral in London?'

'No, no, the church off the Strand here. Old what-washe-called, old Joe Craddock's church.'

'Used to wear a green tweed cap with his dog-collar.'

'That's the fellow. Well, he should see it now. So should you, it seems. Sex cinema is what it is now. You couldn't invent that, could you? You wouldn't dare. Nobody would.'

'Come on, Charlie,' said Garth right on cue, 'you don't mean to sit there and - '

'I bloody do, mate. Adult movies on Screens I and 2. In the nave and chancel respectively, I presume. "Come Play with Me" and another witticism.'

'I dare say they exerted themselves to deconsecrate the building,' said Peter.

You fat old hypocritical Welsh cunt, thought Charlie. 'It would have appealed to Joe, anyway,' he said, "and added for Garth's benefit, 'Used to fuck anything that moved, old Joe did. Bloody marvel, he was. Pulled in an enormous congregation too. Very tough on drink. Of course, I'm talking now about twenty years ago.'

'I didn't know that,' said Malcolm, trying not to sound shocked. 'I mean about his activities.'

'No, well... ' Again Charlie kept to himself what he thought. Still grinning, he met Peter's eye, only for a second, but quite long enough to be sure that Peter was trying not to join in an admiring, part - horrified laugh in reminiscence, something he would certainly have done up until more recently than twenty years ago. 'Amazingly lucky with the horses as well, Joe was. He said he used to count on five to six hundred a year, which in those days was all right. You never ran into anyone who reckoned that was fair.'

Another silence followed. Silences were a great feature of these Bible sessions. Peter sat on with his hands spread on his bulky thighs, sniffing and groaning quietly, perhaps trying to think of something that summed up what he felt about the fate of St Paul's, if so failing. Finally Garth said in his eager, quacking voice, 'Malcolm was telling us, Alun and Rhiannon Weaver are coming back down here to live. They - '

Peter swung himself round almost fiercely on Charlie. 'Had you heard this? Well, you didn't mention it to me just now.'

'You didn't give me much of a chance.'

'Down here to live, you say.'

'Apparently. Yes,' said Charlie, signalling with his face to Malcolm to come in, and after no great delay Malcolm started explaining that the Weavers had rented a house in Pedwarsaint to look round from and things like that while Peter stared at him or in his direction through his thick glasses and Garth listened as if every fact were new to him.

Malcolm did not disclose that, while Peter had been a young lecturer at the local university and Rhiannon in her second year as a student, they had had an affair, and she had got pregnant and had had an abortion performed on her at his expense by a doctor in Harriston, a man incidentally struck off the medical register soon afterwards for another of the same and now long dead. This had been a remarkable train of events in the South Wales of 1947-8; more remarkably still, Peter had not been thrown out of his job at the university, in fact nothing official was ever said on the matter. What counted, after all, not only in South Wales, was not what you knew but who could prove you knew it. Quite soon, however, Peter had given up a promising career in academic chemical engineering for a different sort in the real thing not far away, a few miles along the coast to the west in Port Holder. Rhiannon had promptly vanished to London, where after an obscure interval she had got a job as a receptionist at the BBC, where in turn a year or two later she had met Alun Weaver.

That was, of course, not all that had happened. Just about when Rhiannon had become pregnant, Peter had shifted his attentions to another female, someone outside the university, and after another few months had turned out to be engaged, presumably to this other. His fiancée was a certain Muriel Smorthwaite, the daughter of one of the managers at the tin-plate mill he now worked at. In those days Peter had been considered rather lucky, given his record, to be engaged to anyone at all west of Offa's Dyke, for although the Smorthwaites were from Yorkshire originally, not local, some conscientious neighbour must surely have passed the word. But the two had got married, living in Port Holder for a judicious couple of years before settling in Cwmgwyrdd just on the far side of town..

Charlie had been a student in the same year as Rhiannon, though older than she through war service, and acquainted with her and her mates. He had heard as much about all this as most people not directly involved but had learnt no more since. He had not tried to find out and not been told; he had forgotten about the whole business until that morning. He wondered how well informed the other two here were: Malcolm well enough, as was shown in his every movement and inflection as he spoke, Garth probably not at all.

Malcolm finished his short recital. Evidently Peter, with Garth looking at him in expectation of something or other, could think of nothing to say. His glistening bald head moved from side to side in an agitated fashion.

Charlie gave him an easy one. 'Of course, you were never a great fan of Alun's, were you? As man or writer that I remember.'

Peter turned on him again, but appreciatively this time. 'Bloody Welshman,' he said with relish, doubtless referring to Alun.

'Oh, come on now, Peter,' said Garth, laughing steadily, being very good about not being indignant, 'we're all Welshmen here. Including you as far as I know.'

'More's the pity,' said Peter, draining his glass with a flourish.

On this the door burst open with a suddenness and violence that might well have killed Charlie half an hour earlier, its edge striking the back of his chair, though not hard. Into the sudden hush stepped a man and a woman, both young, both having on knee-boots and other wearables of synthetic material, both carrying crash-helmets. It was at once evident that the tumultuous door-opening had been the result of thoughtlessness rather than any kind of hostility. Unaware both of the hush and of the four looks that went with it, from Peter's glare to Malcolm's mild curiosity, the couple strolled across the room and started looking at some of the DSRC mementos on the wall there and along the mantelpiece above the boarded-up fireplace. When they spoke their accents were not local, perhaps from Liverpool.

'Ladder as at 31St December 1949,' read out the young man and took a pull of what was probably lager. 'What kind of ladder would that be?' He spoke in simple puzzlement. 'Must be all the landlord's stuff,' said the girl. In her hand was an opaque greenish concoction with pieces of ice and fruit floating in it.

'Annual dinner... '

The girl studied the slightly mildewed photograph. 'Nowhere here is that.'

'Chairman... committee... You know, like some sort of club?'

'Served us all right, didn't they?'

The pair had begun to turn shyly towards the group of old men when Garth, having recognized without any sense of novelty that Peter and Charlie were too fat to be expected to make a move and Malcolm too windy, got up and shut the door as loudly as he could, which was not very loudly because it had already come close to shutting itself.

'Er, excuse me,' began the youth.

Garth stared at him without speaking.

'Er, is this some kind of club?'

'Not exactly a club, no,' said Garth, moving his head about and screwing up his face in a confidential way. 'It's more, well, we had been hoping to hold this private committee meeting in just a few minutes. Personal matters, you'll appreciate, er... '

'Oh... well... sorry..'

After an exchange of glances and no delay the two invaders set about leaving. The girl, who was rather tall and walked with a firm tread, looked briefly over at the seated three as she passed.

'And _shut__ the _door__,' said Peter with elaborate movements of his mouth.

When the door had shut, almost soundlessly, Garth puffed out his breath, Charlie said, 'Well done, Garth, you're a great man,' and Peter gave a short roar like a lion keeping in voice.

Malcolm made no sound. He thought the girl's eye had caught his for an instant, not of course out of anything but habit or even politeness, and yet it set him thinking. How many years was it since he had noticed a girl? And what exactly had he seen in this one? - " she was not all that attractive. She was young, yes indeed, not that he could have said what age, but not so much young either as fresh, new, scarcely out of the wrapping-paper with no time for anything to have got at her and started using her up. It was hard to believe that there had been a time when he had lived his whole life among people like that with occasional unimpressive distractions from an aunt or a teacher or a ticket - collector.

'That, that _breed__ haven't necessarily been badly brought up, they're gross and boorish by nature.' It seemed that Peter thought the affray of a moment before had been far too lightly passed over.

'On the contrary,' said Malcolm, quite sharply for him. 'They blundered in rather crassly because they knew no better, but as soon as they grasped the situation their decent instincts took over and they were perfectly civil.'

'I'll go and invite them back in if you like,' said Charlie.

'It's my shout,' said Garth.

'No, mine,' said Peter.

But before he had got properly started on rising to his feet the door opened again, nearly as wide as before but smoothly and silently. There followed a frozen pause which a stranger might have found unsettling. Then a man came into the room and shut the door ceremoniously behind him, a man of the same sort of age as the company, a tall broad man, not fat, wearing an unusually thick naturalcoloured cardigan with scuffed leather buttons. This was Tarquin Jones, known as Tare, landlord of the Bible as long as any of the others could remember. On first sight of him standing behind the beer-pulls in the main bar, perhaps as far back as 1950, Malcolm had thought that he must have suffered a bereavement earlier that morning and had on the instant decided that he, Malcolm, was in some way responsible. But he had stood his ground and quite soon discovered that Tare always had that expression on, at least in public. Now, grasping the backs of Charlie's and Peter's chairs, he leaned over the table and looked them all in the eye one after the other.

'So you managed to dispose of the intolerable intrusion,' he said in a grave tone, at once diffusing a cloud of the ambiguity that hung about so much of what he said.

'They went like lambs,' said Charlie. 'No trouble at all.'

Tare nodded impatiently, already done with the matter. 'Last night,' he went on, lowering his voice, 'they were out there for an hour after I'd shut my house, revving up their bikes and the rock blaring out on their radios and yelling their heads off. They-'

'How extraordinary,' said Malcolm – 'as Charlie said they couldn't have been more tractable a moment ago. No hint of any... '

His voice died away as Tare looked round the circle again, this time with stoical weariness. 'I was thinking in fact,' he began, suddenly affecting a sunny forbearance, 'of a different group of young people altogether. Not the two who went in and out of here just now. No. Others. Who are given to behaving in the way I have tried to describe. As I was saying,' he went on, then said nothing for ten seconds or so before resuming in his original manner, 'They're not from round here, you know, most of 'em. Coming batting down the M4 from Cardiff or Bristol like fiends out of hell any time of the day or night, all with a chick behind there. I tell you, the other Sunday I was coming back from seeing my daughter in Penarth and a crowd of 'em caught up with me and started carving me up as I understand it's called, overtaking me and fanning out in front and then staying level three or four abreast and looking at me, staring at me for, I don't know, it seemed like minutes at a time and going at seventy. Seventy. And talking about me, shouting out to each other about me and pointing at me. I don't mind admitting to you,' he lowered his voice further, 'I was scared, honest I was. Scared.'

When he paused, none of his audience showed any sign of responding, then or at any future time. 'Because this isn't just high spirits or youthful exuberance - we're used to that. No no, what we're faced with is an orchestrated onslaught on our whole culture and way of life. And this concerns you gentlemen particularly. In your position it behoves you to take note and consider what is to be done. If the likes of you won't give a lead I don't know what is to become of us.'

'If you ask me,' said Malcolm, 'what could be at work there is an actual enmity towards the very structure of society.'

This observation seemed to take all the fight out of Tarc.

He said in a bleating tone and with a slight quaver, 'I'm very glad to find you hold that view, Mr Cellan-Davies, because it's rather 'the one I was trying to put forward myself.' Then as he gathered up the empty glasses his manner began to rally a little and grew almost friendly for a moment. 'Er, warm enough in here, are you? Miserable old day out. Now remember all of you, you've only to say the word and I'll bring in the fire.' No one said it, so he withdrew, pausing at the door for his closing line. 'I do beg you to consider seriously the points I've put to you.'

'Dear, dear, there's a character,' said Garth, very much the _son__ of thing he always said after one of Tare's visitations.

'I seemed to quieten him down all right,' said Malcolm modestly.

'Yes, you did, didn't you?' said Peter.

'He goes too far sometimes, old Tare,' said Charlie. 'We know we have to take it and so does he, so he really, shouldn't talk about orchestrated onslaughts and behoving, especially behoving. No, that was naughty.'

'I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean,' said Malcolm.

'Well, teasing us. Defying us to tell him to come off it.'

'Are you saying it's all an act? I know he exaggerates and all that, but... '

Peter answered. 'Tare doesn't know how much of an act it is himself, not any more. He's got so he couldn't tell you whether he means what he says or not. Far from the only one in these parts to have reached that condition.'

'Anyway,' said Garth, 'you and he do seem to see very much eye to eye on the modem world and the youth of today and the rest of it.'

Fortunately, before Peter could answer that one old Owen Thomas (no relation) turned up with a guest of his, a retired chartered accountant from Brecon, and soon after them came old Arnold Spurling and then old Tudor Whittingham, who had beaten the British Empire amateur champion 9-3, 14-12, 9-7 at Wembley in 1953. Arnold had just won a few quid in one of the newspaper bingo competitions and insisted on drinks all round. Charlie started feeling quite good, and even Peter seemed able to put up with the presence of old Arnold and the others.

Owen Thomas went off to the bar for ham rolls and came back with all there was in the eats line, a plate of egg-and-cheese quiches prepared by Tare's granddaughter, who was doing a course in culinary studies at the university. For different reasons Peter, Charlie and Malcolm turned them down. The three decided to leave after the next drink, or rather Peter, whose car was outside, decided that and the other two went along. They had that next drink, and then another quick one which Malcolm declined, and then they left. Garth lived within walking distance, so of course he was going to walk, perhaps as soon as he had finished explaining to Owen Thomas's guest about the importance of not brooding.


3


Peter's car was a Morris Marina of an archaic buff-orange colour relieved here and there by small archipelagos of rust. With nothing said, Charlie got in beside Peter and Malcolm got in the back. This was not easy for Malcolm with his long legs, because Peter had to keep his seat pushed back as far as possible in order to get his stomach behind the wheel. The other half of the back seat was taken up with wooden trays spilling earth and small stones and piled with potatoes, leeks, parsnips and perhaps turnips freshly out of the ground, or at any rate untouched since. Empty tissue cartons, very dirty cloths that had wiped the windows, dog-eared technical pamphlets, graphs and thick bundles of duplicated sheets with a forlornly superannuated look, publishers' circulars, an empty tube of children's sweets, a biscuit wrapper and several books and leaflets about dieting lay elsewhere. When Peter set the car in motion a small capless bottle that might once have held slimline tonic came trundling out from under his seat.

Malcolm peeled one of the diet leaflets off the floor at his side and looked through it. He wanted to be covered in some sense against the possibility that the subject of Rhiannon might come up again. Also diets interested him. His own eating and drinking practice was a conflation of several, often irreconcilable with each other. Thus the two halves of beer a day he reckoned he needed to help to keep him regular meant a cutback in calories elsewhere with the risk of a deficit in vital fibre. More generally, you never knew what one programme or another might come up with in the way of a new hankering-reducer or safe volume-limiter. And there was not such a hell of a lot to read anywhere these days.

Soon enough Malcolm was pretty sure that what he had picked up was no good except to get him through the five minutes now in progress. After forbidding all alcohol except a small glass of dry white wine every year or so, it ran through a remarkably full and imaginative list of everything anybody had ever enjoyed eating and forbade the lot, though surely with some risk of infraction. Anyway, your own eyes were enough to tell you that if old Peter, now listening to something Charlie was telling him about the price of a house in Beaufoy, had ever observed these constraints he had forgotten them again after a couple of hours. Then why did he bother to read or at least buy diet literature? To feel virtuous by laying out nothing more than money. To make promises to himself like a man looking at travel brochures of exotic places. No, more a man reading about polar explorers living off snow, moss and boot-leather. About Red Indian tortures.

Malcolm became quite dreamy. As in his boyhood he had deliberately used thoughts of school, of homework to obscure the prospect of a treat or a birthday before wallowing in delighted expectation, so now he let Peter's overweight problem be obliterated by memories of Rhiannon. The only trouble was that they were not as sharp in his mind as _Lettres de mon Moulin__ and the South Africans playing at Gloucester. His clergyman uncle had taken him.

'Soft as lights, that fellow,' said Peter when Malcolm had been dropped at his front gate. 'Perfectly pleasant, I agree, but dead soft.'

'Something like that, yes,' said Charlie.

'I bet he fills in the month and year on all his cheque counterfoils. '

'Yeah, and writes out the number of pence in words.'

'And sends in box-tops to save three-fifty on a handcrafted presentation decanter.'

'Oh really I think that's going a bit far. But I bet he watches documentaries on the telly.'

'In Welsh.' Peter spoke with genuine rancour. 'And I swear he swings his arms when he walks.'

'Do you know they have wrestling in Welsh now on that new channel? Same as in English oddly enough except the bugger counts _un__ - _dau__ - _tri__ etcetera. Then the idiots can go round saying the viewing figures for Welsh-language programmes have gone up. To four thousand and eleven.'

'The commentary would have to be in Welsh too.'

'Doubtless, doubtless. Did you gather that young Malcolm had, let's say, an attachment to Rhiannon in the long-ago?'

'Something like that,' said Charlie again. 'He wasn't at all specific.'

'I thought he sounded a bit as though he had been attached. But I rather wonder when.'

'He gave a great lyrical spiel about her just before you came. Non-specific, as I said. That doesn't sound very nice, does it?'

'M'm. Non-specificity could cut either way. Meaning he never laid a finger on her but would like us to think he did. Or meaning he did but for some reason doesn't want us to think he did so he goes on as if he didn't. You've got to remember he's a Welshman too.'

'Christ, Peter, nobody would take you for one after that analysis. Anyway I don't think Malcolm's that sort of Welshman.'

'Oh, is there another sort? Actually you know I had a... ' Peter's voice cut off so abruptly that it was hard to be sure he had said what he seemed to have said. He sat in a round-shouldered yet strained posture, arms out to their fullest extent to reach the wheel, legs and feet stretched too and still only just finding the pedals. After a moment Charlie got a quick half-glance from him where a steady look would have been more characteristic, and also feasible with the car drawing up at the Salt House lights. A growl of effort escaped him as he reached even further forward, squashing his paunch severely, and set the wipers going in the fine rain.

'Hard to be sure, of course, that any given bloke hasn't done a touch of finger-laying in a specific case,' said Charlie reflectively. 'Even young Malcolm. I wouldn't put it past - '

'You see, I was having an affair with her myself. You must have heard that, Charlie.'

'Yes.'

'And a bit more besides I shouldn't wonder. I didn't come out of it looking particularly well, I know. I didn't behave particularly well, either.'

After a pause, Charlie said, 'I suppose we all - '

'Not as badly perhaps as some people probably imagine but still not well. Not at all well. So one way and another it was something of a bolt from the bloody blue just now, hearing about her turning up again. Obviously I'll do my best to keep out of her way.'

'Not very obviously after all these years, surely.'

'No, no, there's an awful lot of stuff.... I'll tell you later. For the moment I'd just ask you to, you know, stand by. And there's more to it than steering clear of her. I mean there's him, you see.'

'Yes, there is him.'

'It's not the time now to go into that either. But I expect you can imagine how I feel. Part of it, at least.'

'I can. And I'm quite sure you can imagine quite a bit of how I feel,' said Charlie, making it clear with tone and look that he in his turn was making mentionable what had been known but unmentioned.

'Indeed.' Something not utterly unlike warmth entered Peter's manner. 'Does, er, does Sophie ever mention it or anything? I mean there was never very much in it, was there?'

'Not as far as I know, and Alun wasn't exactly the only one, but then you only need one Alun if I make myself plain. And it was supposed to be all over before I came along, or rather what there was of it was, but there again... Well, there was an afternoon while he was down here on one of his trips five or six years ago when the shop rang up for Sophie and she couldn't be found, and then I heard quite by chance that no one knew where he was at the time either. Probably nothing, I agree. And anyway there was nothing _else__, which is the main point. Because it's not _it__ that matters so much, it's the bloody side-effects. Great man for side-effects, Alun. Of which a traumatically embarrassing poem would be a very mild example.'

'I see that. By Christ I see it. The time he broke down at that service for Brydan - at St Illtyd's?'

'Yeah, and the way he broke down. _"Gwae och, I__ am unworthy to pronounce his praise" and the rest of it.'

'Welcome flash of realism,' said Peter.

'Oh, do you think so? According to me nobody could have been more suitable.'

'Well, yes, all right. When are they coming down, did you say?'

'Not yet. Couple of months. Could you drop me at the G1endower?'

'Sure. What shall I tell Sophie?' Peter's destination was the Norrises', where he would pick up his wife after the coffee-party.

'Just you've dropped me at the Glendower. It won't come as much of a shock.'

When they arrived Charlie asked Peter in for one, but Peter said he thought he had better push on, so Charlie went by himself into the Glendower, in full the Owen Glendower (no Owain Glyndwr crap thank you very much) Tavern and Grill. Being part-owner of this, Charlie was by himself only for a very short time, in fact he found a couple of fellows he knew from County Hall in the bar, which thoughtfully offered seventeen different kinds of Scotch whisky, and in just a few minutes he was at the top of his form.


4


Two empty 1½-litre bottles of Soave Superiore (DOC) stood on the glass-topped table next to a silver tray bearing ten or eleven used coffee-cups, some of them half full of finished-with coffee. The air in Sophie Norris's spacious drawing-room was misty with cigarette-smoke and loud with several conversations. True to Welsh punctuality, most of the ladies there had arrived at or slightly before the off at eleven and so not missed any part of what was going. The coffee and attendant biscuits, having conferred a kind of legitimacy on the session, had been made short work of, swallowed down by some like bread and butter before cake, scamped or skipped completely by others, and the real business was uncorked and poured after about twenty minutes. Obviously it was drunk at different speeds thereafter, though you could have guessed that a couple of those in the room had been at the Soave, or perhaps the Frascati, earlier and elsewhere. After all, it was only wine.

Sophie herself was not one of the couple. Standing by the french window that gave a view of garden, golf links and, remotely, sea, she looked confident and comfortable, very much like the wife of a prosperous caterer recently semi-retired or more, and hardly at all like someone who in her time had been one of the surest things between Bridgend and Carmarthen town - quite a distinction. In tweed skirt and angora sweater her figure was still impressive, though her breasts no longer jutted out of her trunk like a pair of smallish thighs as they had once famously done. At the moment she and Gwen Cellan-Davies were talking about that day's star topic.

'Quite a good-looking man, I suppose you'd have to admit,' said Gwen fair-mindedly. 'Or he was, anyway.'

'Oh, not too bad if you like that rather flashy type.' Sophie spoke in the unreconstructed rather shrill tones of Harriston, well suited for expressionless utterances. 'Of course she's lovely.'

'Mind you, he's a terrible old sham.'

'Sorry?'

'At school with Brydan my eye. Oh, they were both at the Grammar right enough, but three years between them. He can't have known him. Well if he did, it means Brydan was taking an interest in boys three years younger, and I've heard a lot of things about him but that never. You ask Muriel. She'll tell you Peter's the same age as Alun exactly, they were in the same form, and he doesn't remember Brydan at all from then.'

'Yeah, well... '

'And evidently according to Peter that "Alun" business is a lark. "Alan" it always was at school, Peter said, in the English way. That was before he went in for being a Welshman professionally.'

Not many general topics appealed to Sophie, and the question of Wales or being Welsh stood high in her uninterests. 'Oh yes,' she said, quite dully enough to have checked anyone less tenacious than Gwen..

'When he came back after the war he'd been out in the great world and discovered the advantages of Welshness.'

'For Christ's sake tell me what they are, Gwen, and I can pass them on to my old man,' said Muriel Thomas in her breezy, booming voice as she moved closer. She held a freshly opened bottle of Soave, just a litre one this time, from which she refilled Gwen's glass. 'He seems to think it's about on a par with the brand of Cain.'

'I really meant just to appeal to the Saxons, Muriel, you know, the way Brydan used to go on. But actually we were talking about Alun.'

'Oh God, were you? I'm afraid here's one Saxon who's managed to resist the appeal of both Brydan and Alun. I'll say no more because I am, after all, a guest in your country.'

'You're one of us, darling,' said Sophie.

This was certainly true in the sense that, for all her often-proclaimed Englishness, Muriel conformed closely to a prevalent Welsh physical type with her dark hair and eyes and slender build, a fact often remarked on, at least in Wales. If it occurred to her now she gave no sign. Holding back whatever had been on the tip of her tongue, she said, 'My purpose in grabbing you chaps was not to discuss the great Alun but to recruit a rescue expedition for poor Angharad's benefit. La belle Dorothy hath her in thrall.'

After a minute the trio began rather carefully to cross the room. The level of atmospheric pollution seemed if anything to have gone up slightly. Drinking rates among the company might have varied but there was a pretty uniform deep commitment to cigarettes, with the smoke from those actually being smoked well backed up by the three or four stubs left in ashtrays but not put out. Empty or forgotten packets and various bits of wrapping littered the rugs.

On the rug in front of the lighted gas-fire, a large and elegant appliance with fully simulated coals, sat Dorothy Morgan, who had been on Sophie's doorstep at ten to eleven. At her side stood a half-ful! 40-oz. flask of California Pinot Chardonnay and a brimming blue-glass ashtray with the distinction of having two cigarette-ends burning away in it at the same time. She was indeed talking strenuously though not loudly to Angharad Pumphrey, who often had to lean down from her leather armchair to catch the words.

Angharad was not deaf, or no worse than most of them; she was not drunk, not even drinking. What singled her out from those around her was her looks, which were those of a real old lady, though she was not the oldest in years. Part of it came from her clothes - no bright trouser-suits for her - and part her untouched or unretouched hair and the like, but there seemed nothing to be done about her collapsed mouth or the knobbly protrusions of jawbone on either side of her chin or the criss-crossed flabbiness round her eyes. There had been talk of a disfiguring illness at some time before she arrived in these parts from Capel Mererid and presumably after she married Garth, but nobody really knew or would tell.

Dorothy Morgan was saying, 'But it's not just that, their whole outlook is different, their whole view of life.' Her neat short hair-cut and unadorned black-framed spectacles gave her a misleading air of intellectual strictness. 'You can tell from the structure of their language. Do you know Russian at all? Well, it's full of conjugations and inflections. For instance... '

Meanwhile the arrivals were moving into position in businesslike style, Muriel on the arm of the chair, Gwen on a quilted needlework-box and Sophie squatting on the rug. As they did so they all said hello to Angharad and asked how she was and told her they were glad to see her and she said something to all of them back.

During the last part of this Dorothy rose to her knees and, in a slightly louder voice than before, said, 'I was telling Angharad about Russian and how extraordinarily more complicated a language it is than Welsh, and of course English, which means... ' She spoke with an unvarying slight smile and her gaze fixed on some neutral point. '... not necessarily more sophisticated than we are, at least not all the time... ' It was not known when she slept, because nobody had ever been there to see her departing for bed or, when staying in the same house, come down to breakfast and failed to find her already at the table with a cigarette and most likely a glass of wine. '... very primitive because they drop the verb "to be" whenever they can. Like Red Indians.' She was said to have been found once telling the man who was laying the carpets about eohippus.

Dorothy's heavy-duty mode took an appreciable time to come round from, so that when she paused for a second or two, as she did after the Red Indians, nobody had anything to say at first, until Sophie just scraped in on the last of the amber by asking to hear about the trip to Leningrad. Not again, surely? Yes, again, insisted Sophie, and very soon she was having the case for going by Aeroflot put to her with undiminished conviction.

Under this covering fire Muriel, Gwen and Angharad were able to withdraw in good order. Standard Dorothy procedure said that when she got into that son of stride and someone had to sacrifice herself for the sake of the others, then whoever happened to be hostess stepped forward. The punishment seemed to even out pretty well except that on neutral ground, like Dorothy's own establishment, Sophie got landed oftener than her turn. The others would agree rather sheepishly among themselves that she somehow sounded as if she minded it less.

There was no trace at the drinks table of the almost-full litre of Soave Muriel had left on it some minutes earlier. An untouched magnum of Orvieto, however, stood within reach and she set efficiently about opening that, cigarette in mouth, eyes screwed up.

'We haven't seen you here for a long time, Angharad,' said Gwen.

'No, you haven't, and I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't happened to have to take a clock in for repair at that place in Hatchery Road.' Angharad's voice was not old, so much not so that public-utilities men and other strangers still occasionally tried to flirt with her over the telephone. 'I bumped into Sian Smith when she was more or less on her way here.'

'Of course, it is quite a step from where you are.'

'Yes, and it's not much fun when I get here, either, if this is anything like a fair sample.'

'Sorry about old Dorothy. We're sort of used to her, you know. We could see you were stuck.'

'I hope I never have the chance of getting used to her.

What makes that woman think I want to hear her paltry little observations on Russia or Russian or Russians? Or anything else on God's earth?'

No awareness, let alone appreciation, of having been unstuck showed itself in Angharad. On the contrary, her resentment of Dorothy's conduct seemed to grow when no one looked like offering to excuse it. Closely and with apparent curiosity she had watched Muriel expose and pull the cork of the Orvieto; now, all but incredulously, she followed every detail of its Pouring, her own nearly empty glass held austerely to one side. People tended to forget about Angharad in the same sort of spirit as they forgot about her husband, whom, by the way, no living person had ever seen in her company, any more than anyone had ever seen the inside of their house. They wondered about the Pumphreys' domestic and marital life quite as much at these coffee-parties as at the Bible.

'Well, that's just how she is,' said Gwen, defending Dorothy rather late in the day and without much fervour. 'She's always been like it but she's got worse lately. Like everybody else.'

'I mean it's not as if I were a great friend of hers,' said Angharad, accusingly now. 'I hardly know her. Hardly even spoken to her before.'

'You were there, that's enough,' said Muriel.

'What sort of a husband does a woman like that have?' Muriel lit another cigarette and said, 'Very nice chap, old Percy Morgan. She doesn't do it to him. Not when we're about, anyway. They get on together like a house on fire.'

'He's a builder,' added Gwen. 'A _builder__.'

'Well, he builds things like town halls,' said Muriel. After studying Muriel's next inhalation of smoke, Angharad returned to her point. 'But she wouldn't let me get a word in, not a single word. Not even to tell her how riveting she was being.'

'You always get one person like that at this sort of jollification,' said Gwen.

Angharad raised her bushy eyebrows. 'Oh, so that's what it is. Quite frankly, if it stopped short at one person like that I wouldn't mind so much,' she said, graciously looking over Gwen's shoulder as she spoke. 'I don't mind telling you it'll be quite a time before I come this way again. This sort of jollification, as you call it, quite defeats me. I'd better make my farewells. Where's... where's Sophie?'

The other two watched Angharad take brief, undemonstrative leave of her hostess and, without a glance at Dorothy or anybody else, limp heavily from the room. 'That's what I call mellowing with age,' said Muriel, topping up the glasses. 'Oh, I'm that thrilled she didn't mind telling us what she told us.'

'I thought only beautiful people could behave like that.

Poor old thing, though. She's probably in pain.'

'I hope so. It didn't do us any good, sticking up for Dorothy.'

Gwen screwed up her face. 'Not a lot of that, though, was there, actually?'

'Now you mention it, no, there wasn't. It's not much of a defence of a burglar to say he's always been a burglar.'

'Perhaps we should have agreed with her about how terrible Dorothy is.'

'Then she'd have had it in for us for knowing her.

There's no pleasing some people, as you've probably noticed yourself.'

A general stir began. Glasses were drained, but not always left empty because there seemed to be a feeling that no opened wine should be allowed to remain undrunk, perhaps out of some old Cymric superstition. Things might have gone differently, or just further in the same direction, if Sophie had broached the 3-litre box of Selected Balkan Riesling on top of the drinks cabinet, whose contents of gin, whisky and other strong liquor were of course perfectly safe from any or all of the party. Two, three women went to say good-bye to Sophie, who was so relieved at being able to speak again that she refused to let them go, at any rate until after she had answered the door-bell. Sian Smith fell down on her way out but soon got up again and made it into the hall. When Sophie reappeared she had Peter Thomas with her. The sight of him standing alone on the doorstep had been enough to let her know that he had dropped Charlie at the Glendower. Without consulting him, still less offering him a glass of wine, she crossed to the drinks cabinet.

Peter looked rather shaken. After a moment's hesitation he advanced into the room with a real reluctance that he tried, late on and not very convincingly, to hide in a comic pretence of reluctance. He and Muriel waved to each other and it was the same or similar with him and Gwen, him and Dorothy, him and a couple of others. Flapping his hand at the smoke-filled air, he said in a bantering tone, 'So this is what all you busy housewives get up to while your men-folk are slacking and boozing their heads off in the pub.'

It was not very good, though surely better than nothing, and he had done his best to sound pleasant, and he had sounded quite pleasant, at any rate for him, but nobody seemed to hear much and nobody came over, not even Dorothy, until Sophie brought him a gin and tonic, offering to fetch ice which he forbade. He and she chatted about something, very likely more than one thing, for however long it was before Muriel collected him and took him off. If his shaken look had departed it was in place again by this time.

Of all the guests only Dorothy remained. She would not move before another piece of standard procedure fetched Percy over from Pedwarsaint to shift her, probably, though not certainly, by the power of words. There was no standard procedure for that.


5


'Good party at the good old Bible, I trust,' said Muriel. 'Who was there?'

Peter told her.

'You wonder why on earth you go, especially when you've got there and find it's exactly like it always is, and then you realize that's why you went. I suppose once upon a time we did things for a change. Malcolm full of the news about the Weavers, was he?'

'Well yes, he was rather.'

'What was your reaction?'

'It came as no surprise. Alun's always threatened to return to his Welsh roots, as perhaps you remember.'

'Perhaps I do, but that doesn't mean I want to remember.'

'Nor me. How was the do at Sophie's?'

'Much as usual, as I was saying. Quite enjoyable, that is, and many thanks.' With no perceptible pause and almost no change of tone, Muriel went on, 'Certainly not the assemblage of fools, bores and madwomen you made it crystal clear you took it for, losing no time in doing so let it be said. You emptied that drawing-room in sixty seconds flat. Congratulations. Super. Your best yet.'

Peter, behind the wheel as they drove towards Cwmgwyrdd, thought as many times before of a film he had seen about half a century earlier. In it, a sadistic sergeant broke the spirit of a soldier in a military prison by beating him up at systematically random intervals, from more than a day down to a quarter of an hour, so that the victim never knew when the next attack was coming, never felt safe. Life with Muriel, it seemed to Peter, had over the last seven or eight years turned into a decreasingly bearable version of that. There were times, it was true, and this was one of them, when you could be morally certain a drubbing was on the way, not from anything she said or did but because you had spotted something disagreeable to her, either in itself or in its associations, drifting to the surface over the past few minutes or so; that was enough for her. For some strange reason, though, this kind of early warning did little to soften the eventual impact. He actually felt the sweat break out now on his forehead.

'Could I ask you to hold it for a bit, until we're home? If you don't I might drive into something. I'm not threatening to, I just might.'

'You might well, I agree with you, any time, with your belly forcing you back into that dangerously distant and also incidentally ludicrous posture.' Muriel's style made it sound as if she had spent weeks thinking of nothing else. 'I don't think you can have appreciated quite how unattractive an object you are. I'm not _just__ talking about physically though I certainly _am__ talking about physically for a start. You emanate hopelessness and resentment and boredom and death. No wonder everybody shrank away from you.'

Again familiarly, this had an uncomfortable quasi-sense about it. If Peter had really wanted peace at this point, however limited, he might have done well to leave it there or to beg for mercy. Instead he found himself showing what defiance he could. 'I just happened to come in at the end. They'd started leaving before I arrived.'

'You sent them on their way unrejoicing. Which incidentally you're in process of doing to me. I'm not sure how much longer I can stand you.'

'The past is past. Nothing but a waste of time wishing it had been different. '

'Who's said anything about the past?'

'You have. Of course you have. Your great theme, isn't it?'

That one failed to go off. Muriel just talked on at a slightly enhanced rate about what supposed friends of his had said to her about him and harmless things like that. He concentrated as fixedly as he could on driving. If he could have been reasonably sure of killing them both outright he would have been inclined to swerve into the path of an oncoming bus or builder's lorry, but as it was he took them safely past the War Memorial, through Irish Town, across the River Iwerne and into what had once been the mining village of Cwmgwyrdd, now a semi-smart outer suburb. Every so often he tried to make himself believe something he knew to be true, that Muriel would not go on like this for ever and that after a few minutes she would go back to being rather mechanically affable until next time, but he stayed unbelieving.

They were home, getting out of the car in the built-on garage of their quite decent Thirties villa on the pricier seaward side. When Peter had locked up, Muriel gave him a glance of studied neutrality, the signal for some kind of change of direction. He was glad he had followed his instinct and left the vegetables (out of old Vaughan Mowbray's patch that morning) unmentioned in the car. To flaunt them now might have led to requests to come out and say what he had against the way he was normally fed, and further.

On the front doorstep she said to him, 'You know, I don't think that news about the Weavers is good news for anyone.'

After all these years they really understood each other very well. Her saying that in an ordinary tone meant that hostilities were suspended and more, that that subject was now free, cleared for bringing up at any later stage without penalty. Further yet, as might not have been instantly clear to anyone but him, it constituted an apology, or the nearest she was ever going to get to one.

These thoughts occupied him while he went and got a couple of cold fish-fingers out of the refrigerator for his lunch, so that he failed to consider whether he agreed with the content of what she had said or not. Muriel pulled on her wellies and tramped off into the garden. She never ate lunch.


Two - Rhiannon, Alun


1


A train, a particular train, the 15.15 out of Paddington on an afternoon some weeks after Peter Thomas had decided to leave the potatoes and leeks in his car, emerged from the Severn Tunnel into Wales. The area had once been called Monmouthshire but because of a decision taken in London was now called Gwent, after an ancient Welsh kingdom or whatever it was that might have formerly existed there or thereabouts. Anyway, it was Wales all right, as Rhiannon Weaver reckoned she could have told by the look of it through the carriage window. There was no obvious giveaway, like road-signs in two languages or c1osed-down factories, but something was there, an extra greenness in the grass, a softness in the light, something that was very like England and yet not England at all, more a matter of feeling than seeing but not just feeling, something run-down and sad but simpler and freer than England all the same. Ten minutes to Newport, another hour in the train after that and ten or fifteen minutes more by road.

This journey was the Weavers' final move and tonight would be their first night on Welsh soil as residents, though they were booked to stay with Gwen and Malcolm Cellan Davies that first night. Rhiannon had rather expected to make the trip by car, and so among other things to be saved a fair amount of packing, but had soon realized that, for somebody wanting to be noticed arriving, trains had the great virtue that they turned up at a fixed place at a fixed time. In one way it would have been better to fly down, but scheduled flights only went as far as Rhoose, which was wrong anyway because of being the Cardiff airport.

She turned her head away from the window to find Alun in the next seat giving one of his special beams with the eyes half closed and mouth slightly lifted. It meant more or less that in spite of everything, which was saying something, he was devoted to her and that she knew, in spite of everything again, that there was no one like him. She would have had to agree with Gwen that he was quite a good-looking man, but more than quite - remarkably, at least considering the life he led. The skin had held up well, no more than pink, as if after a day watching cricket; the famous mane of hair, once and for a great many years a deep bronze, was now snow-white, at any rate much whiter than the streaky, lifeless grey it would have been if left to itself. Most of his friends were pretty sure that he improved on nature in this department as in others; not many of them would have guessed that Rhiannon put the whitener on for him while they giggled and had drinks.

Suddenly Alun jerked himself upright and started waving vigorously to the buffet-car steward who had come into sight at the far doorway. The man was smiling and nodding and coming for them at top speed, but Alun still waved. In the rear another, younger and subordinate, buffet-car steward approached less swiftly.

'Sorry for the delay, Mr Weaver.' The first steward looked and sounded really cut up as he unloaded a miniature of Whyte & McKay, a can of Idris ginger beer and trimmings. 'Always a crowd before Newport,' he added.

Then his manner changed momentarily to conditional consternation. 'You did say no ice, didn't you, Mr Weaver? Now you have got everything you want, have you? Mrs Weaver? Are you sure? Nothing to eat?' He looked swiftly over their shoulders and back again and went on, mouthing the words to show that they were not for all ears, 'Toasted sandwich, bacon or Danish Blue and ploughman's pickle? Are you quite sure now?'

Alun said he was, and reeled off a string of heartfelt appreciative expressions while he paid and moderately tipped.

Maintaining it had been a pleasure, Emrys said, 'Now here's a young man who as good as went down on his bended knees to me to be given the chance of meeting you. May I introduce Darren Davies. This is Mr Alun Weaver, OBE.'

The lesser steward was brought forward. He looked rather uneasy and not at all the type to go out of his way to meet an elderly Welshman famous for something unintelligible, but he managed a smile.

Alun sprang up and stuck out his hand. 'Actually, it's CBE. How do you do, Darren. What part of Wales do you come from?'

'Llangefni. Anglesey.'

'Yes, Darren's a North Walian,' said Emrys in the un-shocked tone he might have used to announce that the lad was a soccer-player or a Roman Catholic.

'Anglesey's beautiful. I was up there two years ago. Aberffraw. Now Emrys I mustn't keep you any longer from your duties, it wouldn't be fair on other people.'

'Very well, Mr Weaver. But before I go I want to say just this. Everybody is delighted to learn that you and Mrs Weaver have determined to come and live among us here in South Wales. Proud too. Honoured.'

When Alun had said he was grateful and very touched and had shooed Emrys and Darren away and beaten down some of the stares from nearby passengers, not all of them reverential, nor all comprehending, he turned to Rhiannon and raised his eyebrows in a rueful, resigned way. 'You've got to do it,' he said as he had said many times before.

'Of course you have,' she said likewise.

'He'll be telling them in the pub tonight how he had that boring old fart Alun Weaver on-his train.' He had said something like that before too but less often.

'Nonsense, he was thrilled, you could see.'

'Anyway a bloody sight more thrilled than he'd have been if I'd asked him to actually produce a bacon bloody sandwich.'

At Cambridge Street station it looked for nearly a minute as though there was not going to be anything that Alun had got to do, but then there appeared a squat man in a white raincoat with what Rhiannon considered was a very small piece of machinery in his hand.

'Alun Weaver?'

'Yes indeed - BBC?'

'Jack Mathias. No, Glamrad,' said the fellow hoarsely, referring to the local commercial radio station.

'Oh. Oh, very well.' Alun peered vainly about for a moment longer, then switched himself on. 'Good to see you, Mr Mathias, and thank you for coming. I hope you haven't had to wait too long. Now what can I do for you?'

Mathias seemed to be suggesting that he and Alun should conduct their business on a public bench on the station platform. They were under cover but drizzle came gusting in from the open and there was a good deal of noise of people and trains.

'Can't we go somewhere warmer?' asked Alun. 'And quieter?' He tilted his head in an unnatural way to keep the wind from blowing his hair out ·of position.

'Sorry, we need the noise for the actuality.' Mathias was efficiently setting up his recorder on the bench beside him. 'The ambience. One, two, three, four, testing, testing.'

'Are you going to need my wife for any of this?'

'No,' said Mathias. The question evidently puzzled him. 'All right.' Dissatisfaction with the proceedings showed in Alun's face, but also acceptance. He said to Rhiannon, 'Go and have a cup of tea, love. No need for you to stand about here.'

She felt the same, but thought she would stay and just see or rather hear the start. Soon, so soon as to constitute a vague put-down, Mathias was ready. He had not yet looked either of them in the eye.

'Alun Weaver, Cambridge Street station, take one,' he said to nothing in particular. 'Tell me, what does it feel like to return to live in Wales after all these years away?'

'Many things grave and gay and multi-coloured but one above all: I'm coming home. That short rich resounding word means one simple single thing to a Welshman such as I, born and bred in this land of river and hill. And that thing, that miraculous thing is - Wales. Fifty years of exile couldn't fray that stout bond. Heart is where the home is, and the heart of a Welshman...'

The warm, lively voice was soon lost when Rhiannon started to walk towards the barrier carrying the overnight case that Emrys had fought so hard for Darren to be allowed to carry. She held herself very straight and still answered physically to most of Malcolm's description, though her grey eyes had never held the touch of blue he had said he saw in them.

On her two recent trips to these parts she had travelled by car and she had not seen the station for over ten years. So far, except for the signs, it looked more or less unchanged, and of course the outlook was just the same, the view of an expanse of hillside with those unmistakable terraces of small houses, some running along from left to right, some up and down, among patchy grassland with stretches and bits of cliff of bare rock, few trees and no bright colours anywhere. She had always thought it was incredibly typical, South Wales at one go, though not the kind of thing you put on a picture postcard, and looking at it now under thin rain she felt she had remembered it exactly as it was.

What they called the station concourse, the hall, was more or less unrecognizable: coffee-shop, travel bureau, passport-photograph booth and electronic-looking screen of arrivals and departures. Let into the wall below this she noticed a commemorative plaque, perhaps the one Alun had been so fed up at not being asked to unveil the previous year. After ac nose round she went into the coffee-shop, where everything that was not colouring-book red, blue or yellow was black. There was a very poor selection of things to eat and drink and only one girl serving, who seemed to be waiting for something or somebody that was not Rhiannon and who, like that interviewer, never looked at you. When she had given up hope of whatever it was she wordlessly produced and handed over a cup of tea.

The tables and chairs each stood on a single immovable stump to prevent them being picked up and thrown about. In Rhiannon's experience Welshmen had never gone in for that type of behaviour, but probably that had changed too. The tea turned out to be as nasty as that served in the old torn-down refreshment room, but in a different way; hot, though. As she sipped it she wondered what Alun had been seriously expecting, what a radio man was a let-down from. The mayor, the MP, the chairman of the Welsh Arts Council, a crowd of fans with autograph-books? Well? A TV team? He did a lot of TV and knew much more about it than she did, but...

Rhiannon had never settled in her own mind at any stage how important or well known Alun thought he was, or even really was except very roughly, but at times like this it crossed her mind that he might be making too much of that Part of himself. That might go with being his kind of writer. And that was a bit of a puzzle too, how he was always saying he wanted to be regarded as a writer first of all and then always going on television and being interviewed.

He came in sight now, striding towards the glass door, stopping all at once as somebody recognized him, shaking hands, grinning, nodding enthusiastically and writing something - not in an autograph-book but never mind. That was a bit of luck. But when he reached her he had his discontented expression on, with frown and nose-twitches.

'That chap was a prick,' he said, staring at her. 'A _prick__. Do you know what he asked me? Whether I found my books still sold reasonably well. Can you beat it? And when I said Yes as crappily as I could - what else could I do? Well, then he said he meant in England as well as in Wales. I mean Christ, you'd think they'd have told him.' He stared at her a moment longer before letting his shoulders collapse and laughing through his nose, and she joined in. 'Let's get out of this place. Sorry, finish your tea. Are you sure?'

They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said _TaxilTacsi__ for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before. It was starting to get dark and the lights were coming on, reflected in the wet pavements. Some of what she saw was no different or not much, but other things that she remembered well enough, from the old Mount joy Arms Hotel with the green-and-tan frieze of classical figures to that mock-rustic shop where you could get very good doughnuts, had vanished so thoroughly that it was impossible to say whereabouts they had stood. But the town was still the place where some of the special parts of her life had come and gone.

When thirty seconds had passed with still no taxi Alun started making tutting noises. 'I do think Malcolm might have met us,' he said. 'Lazy bugger.'

'I was there when you told him not to because the train might be late. Which it was, wasn't it?'

'Oh, were you and did I? Perhaps that's why he's not here. Let's say partly, anyway.'

After another minute, which was quite as long as any such minute with Alun about, a taxi arrived, in fact a London-model taxi, rare in this part of the world. Something about this displeased him. As they moved off he settled himself insistently on the jump-seat behind the driver and tried to talk to him through the open glass panel with a lot of shouting and calls for repetition. It was possible to guess that he had been expecting an ordinary saloon with a passenger-seat up front. Eventually he abandoned the struggle and came and sat beside Rhiannon.

'You can't have a proper conversation under those conditions,' he said.

'Of course you can't. What did you want one for?'

'Well, you know, I always like talking to drivers and people when I'm here. Very Welsh thing. It's a completely different relationship to what you get in England. Difficult to explain.'

'You needn't to me. I am Welsh too as it happens. Boyo.'

'Piss off,' he said, squeezing her hand.


2


Rhiannon and Gwen settled down in the kitchen after Alun and Malcolm had gone along to the Bible for a couple of beers before supper. The two women had been close friends at the university, members of a trio whose third party was Dorothy Morgan. Gwen had put a strong case for leaving Dorothy out of the evening's doings altogether, but Rhiannon had overruled her, mostly on the grounds that after all it was her inaugural, so to speak. Accordingly a false time of arrival had been circulated and the coast was 'reckoned to be clear for a good hour yet.

In Rhiannon's as well as Malcolm's eyes it was not an attractive kitchen, long and narrow with barely room for six people to sit down. At the moment you would have had trouble finding a vacant flat surface big enough to make a pot of tea on, the sink was full of pans not left to soak, just dumped there, and two or three of Malcolm's shirts hung from a cup-hook on the dresser. It took her back to Gwen's room in Brook Hall, the women's hostel - spick and span every Monday morning and in a frightening piggy mess by tea-time, all sandals, jam and lecture-notes, with plenty of sand underfoot in the summer term. There was always something that needed doing first, she used to say. Rather different now, you might have thought, but then it never worked like that.

With a small start Rhiannon noticed that the bottle of white wine on the table in front of her was not the same as the one they had started on quite a short time earlier. This had a green instead of a blue-and-white label and was also about half empty already. The excitement of getting here and of a sudden feeling, dim and out of nowhere but still real, that things had not stopped happening to her after all, that there were unknown possibilities lined up, had carried her away. Had she drunk two glasses? Three? Well, more than was sensible in the time. It would not do to start following in Dorothy's footsteps, if they were at all as Gwen had described a little while back and was now going on about again.

'Absolute hell. Sophie had to tell her there was no more wine and Charlie put on an act of trying to persuade her to have whisky. Of course if she had... '

If anyone was following in Dorothy's footsteps, thought Rhianno~ to herself, it might be Gwen. A bottle's-worth of wine had gone down that throat since the start of the session and there was no one around to say how much had before that. The mini-story about Dorothy and the whisky had been touched on already that evening. It seemed quite a distance from the shandy-sipping Gwen of Brook Hall days. But the rest of her was unchanged: a little bit nosy, a little bit catty, but sensible, shrewd, down-to-earth, now as then the one to see through the shams and the wishful thinking. She was absolutely as before when, mixing hesitancy with cheek, she said, 'Haven't really had a chance to ask you this before, old thing, but, er, how do you feel about coming back to live round here?'

Rhiannon would have liked to hear Alun answering that. 'I've always thought I would in the end,' she said tamely. 'Nearly all the Welsh people I've talked to in London say the same thing.' And anyway here I bloody am, she felt like adding.

'But they don't actually come, most of them, do they?

Too settled where they are, I dare say. Mind you, I always thought you and Alun were pretty firmly fixed there in Highgate. Especially you yourself, Rhi. You really cut yourself off from down here, didn't you, in the last few years anyway. Not like Alun. He's kept up with, oh, a lot of people here and there.'

'No, well I'm sorry, but you know, you keep leaving it and then all of a sudden you find it's too late, anyway without a lot of explanation.'

'Of course, and then your mother dying, you haven't got her to come down for. You'll soon pick up the threads again.'

There was a silence that was pretty clearly an interval before more of the same from Gwen's side. Rhiannon let it go on; she never minded silences. On this occasion she partly filled in with the thought that one of the reasons for not accompanying Alun on his Welsh trips, the one that had always seemed to come to mind first, was to give him a free hand in keeping up with certain people, people like that doctor's wife by Beaufoy and the woman with the extraordinary hairdo who had been second-in-command at the mental home. He had been a model husband for days, weeks afterwards when he got back. But Rhiannon was not going to tell Gwen any of that, nor that she hoped Alun would set about finding some people to keep up with out at Capel Mererid or further, once he was settled down here.

Gwen looked at her in an understanding, caring sort of way. 'But you did, _you__ did really want to come? I mean you weren't talked into it however nicely?'

'No,' said Rhiannon, trying not to sound too flat or final. 'No qualms? I know you've got some painful memories of the old days.' Gwen had turned quite sad now, as though some of it had happened to her as well. 'Aren't you afraid at all of stirring them up?'

However much wine might or might not have gone down it seemed kind of early to get on to such matters, but they had been bound to arise some time. 'A bit. But it's all a long time ago, what went on then. That's if it's the thing with Peter you're talking about. Do you know, I never think of it.'

'Oh really. You can't forget it though, can you?'

'No, but you can stop feeling bad about it, I mean I have. No point.'

'No point, no, but women have an awful way of feeling things there's no point in them feeling.'

'I know what you mean all right. I suppose I've just been lucky.' Again, Rhiannon wanted to say something like there were times when one person could. get away with murder as far as another person was concerned, and even after the times had changed completely, for good, that part stayed the same, but she had never told anybody that. She said, wanting to know though not necessarily from Gwen, 'How is Peter? Do you see him much?'

'Not a lot, no. Malcolm runs into him at the pub occasionally. He's fine as far as I can gather, for his age you know. Run to fat rather. And, well, I get the impression he's not very pleased with life.'

'I suppose he's retired now.'

'According to Malcolm he hasn't a good word to say for anyone or anything.'

'He's not the only one. Muriel's around, I suppose?'

At this name the two caught each other's eye and as if by pre-arrangement made remarkably similar frowning, blinking, whistling faces. On instinct they drew closer together in their chairs.

'Oh yes,' said Gwen. 'Yes, she's around. There's a strange one as they say.'

'Well, I hardly know her. I can't really say I know her.'

'I can never tell what she's thinking. There she is going on as nice as pie and I've no idea what's in her head at all. I realize I've no idea what's going through her mind.'

'She gives you that look, sort of measuring, summing you up. Actually I haven't seen her for God knows how long.'

'She may love us all but somehow I doubt it.'

'It's not exactly cold, is it, because in a way she's very friendly. It doesn't go with her voice.'

'I wonder how those two get on. They're funny together.

Like two people at work who've got to hit it off while they're there but you can bet they never go near each other outside. Like in front of the servants.'

'What?' Rhiannon wondered if she was falling asleep. 'Does Malcolm hear anything, I mean from his mates?'

'Don't know. Sometimes I catch an awful look on Peter's face when he doesn't think anybody's watching. Afflicted. Stricken.'

'Oh, I know that stricken look from the old days. I used to tell him he was only... '

When no more followed, Gwen said, 'Christ, she doesn't half put it away, young Muriel. Not regularly, not every day, just occasionally, but then - wow! It doesn't show on her but whenever I happen to catch sight of her glass it's either full or empty. Not that she's anything special, mind. There's Dorothy... ' Gwen paused, perhaps trying to remember whether she had told Rhiannon the one about the whisky. If so, the effort was successful, because she went on, '... and Charlie of course... '

'I haven't seen Charlie for - '

'No use expecting much sense out of him after about six o'clock at night. He's got this restaurant in Broad Street now. Co-owner of it with his brother. I don't know whether you remember Victor. Not my type at all. Absolutely not my cup of tea. He's you know.'

'What, you mean.. '

'You know,' said Gwen, nodding slowly. 'Well, we're not supposed to mind them these days but I can't help it. I came to them late, sort of. For a long time I didn't know there was any such thing. And there wasn't really then, not in Wales. When I first heard about them they were in places like Paris and London. You know, Oscar Wilde. You can say a lot against the chapel but at least it kept them down. And I reckon everybody being poor helped. They couldn't dress up or anything.'

Rhiannon remembered Gwen talking in that style in her room in Brook Hall, about chaps among other things, saying what she probably really thought but being jokey too so as to stay in the clear about something. According to Dorothy, who had always been a great one for psychology, it showed a basic insecurity. Whatever it showed it was quite fun to listen to but it did tend to slow down the conversation, as now in fact. Gwen seemed to have dried up though she showed no sign of being insecure about that. 'This queer brother of Charlie's,' said Rhiannon.

'_Victor__, yes. He runs the restaurant with his, with a friend of his. Nothing for Charlie to do but chat to the customers and knock back the Scotch and tell himself he's working. Not conducive to health. Eventually he nods off at the table or in the bar and Victor sends him home in a taxi.'

'Not much of a life for Sophie.'

'Oh, I don't think she minds too much. She has got this shop - just a sort of boutique,' said Gwen in response to Rhiannon's quick look and hurried disappointingly on. 'The thing is, Charlie's got nothing else to do and he can afford it. It's quite a problem for retired people, I do see. All of a sudden the evening starts starting after breakfast. All those hours with nothing to stay sober for. Or nothing to naturally stay sober during, if you see what I... We used to laugh at Malcolm's dad, the way he used to mark up the wireless programmes in the _Radio Times__ in different-coloured pencils. Never caught him listening to any of them but it was an hour taken care of. Drink didn't agree with him, poor old Taffy. Some of us have got a lot to be thankful for.'

Watching Gwen refill her glass and also send a minor stream down its outside, Rhiannon wondered what, if anything, she told herself she was doing. Did she just not know what she was really doing? As any wife of Alun's would have had to be, Rhiannon was almost as used to people getting drunk as she was to them having a drink, but she had learnt too that there was a stage beyond that. It was a little discouraging to find, a couple of hours after arriving to live among them, that everybody round the place seemed to be getting there regularly if they were not funny in some way. Or (Muriel) had a touch of both.

Gwen was turning serious and inquisitive all over again.

She said, 'How did you actually react to the idea of settling down in these pans?' This had not got to be another bit of maundering; it was a trick of Gwen's to keep coming back to a point until her curiosity was either satisfied or else knocked firmly on the head - a very minor improvement on the maundering option if you asked Rhiannon.

'Thrilled,' she said rather loudly.

'You don't mind my asking? I suppose the two of you discussed it pretty thoroughly before you took the decision.'

'Not really, no. Over in a moment.'

'Oh yes. Which of you in fact got the idea first?'

'We found we'd both been thinking about it for some time.'

'But who was the first to mention it? Was it you? Just interested. '

'No, it was Alun. He came out with it one morning at breakfast. '

'And you fell in with it straight away.'

'Yes. I seemed to have my mind already made up. I don't really know why.'

'Oh. I expect you had a lot of friends in Highgate.' Rhiannon nodded from the waist upwards. 'Yes, I was quite firmly fixed there. Look, old thing, if you're trying to get me to say Alun was the one who wanted to come and he managed to browbeat me into it then you're wasting your time. He was keener than I was to start with but I was keen enough. Not that that would have made any difference in the end to whether we came or not.'

'Have you always done what he wanted?'

'Yes, of course I have, in anything like that. He earns the money.'

'You let that man walk all over you, Rhi. I told you he would.'

'Did you? Well, this is one time he hasn't.'

At this Gwen seemed to give up. She scrumpled bits of cigarette-wrapping and stowed them in vacant parts of her ashtray and carefully blew some ash off the table-top. With a quirky smile she said, 'How is Alun?'

That sounded really nice for about half a second, like an easy exam question: anything you feel like saying on the subject will do. Rhiannon half wanted to answer with a run-down on Alun's medical check-up last month, featuring the part where the doctor had told him, rather coldly, apparently, that his liver as well as his hean and lungs was in excellent condition. But she felt she had to be a little more forthcoming than that. She saw that Gwen had switched to a smile with raised eyebrows. What a lot of expressions she knew.

'He's just the same as ever,' said Rhiannon. 'Always jolly and lively except when I don't want him to be. That's the chief thing about him as far as I'm concerned.'

This went down less than well. Gwen got up quickly and toddled to the litter-bin behind Rhiannon. There, having let the empty bottle rustle and thump down inside, she was to be heard knocking out the ashtray on the edge of the bin. Silence followed while she presumably regrouped. When she spoke it was clear from the acoustics that her back was turned. Rhiannon shifted uneasily on her chair.

'You know, Malcolm was absolutely knocked sideways when your letter came. We'd heard talk but nothing definite. Knocked him completely sideways.'

'Not with horror, I hope.'

'Of course not with horror. With delight. With joy.' A loud smacking pop indicated what Gwen had been up to while out of sight. 'But something else as well, Rhi, you know that.'

Gwen came into view again with the new bottle and the emptied but still dirty ashtray and rather flung herself down in her seat at the table.

'You were his first love,' she said matter-of-factly.

'That's nice to hear. He's one of the sweetest men I've ever met.' Rhiannon meant what she said, and could not understand why she so much disliked speaking the words. 'He never talks about it,' said Gwen, looking at her watch. 'Never says what happened.'

'Gwen, really, there's nothing to talk about. _Nothing__ happened.'

Rhiannon felt what was almost admiration for her friend and at the same time wanted to hit her a certain amount for the way she accepted the message without any nonsense about believing it or even somehow not believing it. She finished nodding her head and sat for a time fiddling with her glass, which she had refilled, and moving her eyebrows about, as much as to say that here came the punch. At the instant she drew in her breath to deliver it the door-bell rang, a peremptory, office-type sound. When a moment later Rhiannon heard Dorothy's voice she sniggered to herself.

Then Dorothy came in, embraced Rhiannon at length, apologized for being early, asked to hear all her news and listened, or at least stayed quiet and watching, while she told some of it. This startling behaviour intrigued Rhiannon and obviously disconcerted Gwen, who twice at least seemed on the point of breaking in to protest that the whole thing was a put-up job, meant to bring her into disrepute, most unsporting and certain to wear itself out soon. On the last point at any rate she would have scored, for Dorothy sent her first glass of wine down in a little over ten minutes and her second in a little under, and not before Alun, Malcolm and Percy got back from the Bible, but well before the end of the evening, she started telling them all, and then telling just Gwen, about a tribe in probably New Guinea she had been reading about who built houses in trees that they never occupied and had perhaps at some distant era intended for the spirits of their ancestors to live in, but perhaps not, and other things like that. When the time came, however, she went off quite meekly, taking less than a quarter of an hour to move from just inside the front door to just far enough outside it. More than once in that time she had invited Gwen and Rhiannon to coffee at her house the following morning.

'Is she like that all the time now, did you gather?' asked Alun as he and Rhiannon were undressing in the little guest bedroom. 'Malcolm said something.'

'Quite a lot of it, evidently, but I think some of it tonight was the excitement of seeing us.'

'Seeing you, more like. She's never had much time for me.' He stood on one leg and shook the other with tremendous force to rid it of that pan of his trousers. 'I can't think why not.'

Rhiannon got into bed and started on the considerable routine necessary to shape her pillow correctly. 'She was sober when she arrived.'

'Yeah, well when you're knocking it back like that all day every day you get a sort of float, or do I mean balance. You only need a bit of topping-up and you're off, gone. A plateau.'

'Poor little thing.'

'Poor little thing be buggered,' said Alun musically, also getting into bed. He turned the light out, lay down and put his arms round Rhiannon as he did every night, or rather every night he was there, with her. 'We're the poor little things having to take it. And poor old Percy's the poorest littlest thing of the lot.'

'I think he can handle her. No, I meant it means she must have some idea of what she's like. She stayed sober all day because she wanted to be in a good state to meet me, her old friend. Means she must know she normally gets into bad states. Mustn't she?'

'She mayor may not know but she obviously doesn't bloody care or she wouldn't get into them.'

'I don't suppose she can help it much, it's a bit late for that.'

'If she can help it once she can help it again.' Alun worked his way through an intensive spell of sniffing, throat-clearing and grunting. When he had finished he said, 'Old Gwen hadn't been exactly short-changing herself either, had she?'

'No. Far from it. She didn't use to do that. She's a bit different all round, I thought.'

'Well, speaking from the old lofty pinnacle, I imagine decades of piss-artistry can't help leaving their mark on the character. Christ Almighty, what son of lot have we got ourselves into? Well, should be fun. Of a kind, at least. One thing about you, sweetheart, you're never going to be any trouble that way. Or any other way. It's a marvellous thing. To know that.'

After a minute or two he pulled his arms back and turned away over on to his side of the bed. That was not what he did every night.


3


A few days later Cambria Television made arrangements to record an interview with Alun at the Weavers' rented house in Pedwarsaint, the suburbanized former fishing village in or near which they hoped to settle down. From the vanished quay the smacks had gone out in numbers for the oysters in the bend stretching over to Courcey Island on the east side, and sold their product from Bristol to Barnstaple until overfishing and industrial pollution wiped out the beds before the Great War. A marina stood there now, completed only the previous year, the resort of owners of medium-grade casinos or smallish chains of coin-op laundrettes from Birmingham and points north who came in at the weekends down the _MS-M4__ or, increasingly, by air taxi to the strip at Swanset on Courcey. And of course, where not so long ago it had been hake and chips, bottled cockles, pork pies and pints of Troeth bitter, these days it was cannelloni, paella, stifado, cans of Foster's, bottles of Rioja and - of course - large Courvoisiers and long panatellas, just like everywhere else.

Barring perhaps the oyster details for their elegiac potential, none of this would have been worth a second thought to Alun, certainly not today. He was charged up by the television presence, more by the simple expectation of appearing in front of its cameras than by having pulled off any sort of coup in securing a spot, even the lead spot, on _The Week in Wales__. Necessary, though. Perhaps on reconsideration not insignificant after all. He had done England, got out of it what there was for him to get out of it; he could never have hoped to be omnipresent there. In Wales he could, or was going to have a bloody good try.

The house belonged to a remarkably opulent official in a local housing department, at present holidaying with his wife in the Caribbean, a man whose future acquaintance could not, given reasonable luck, be a bad thing. Nor could being filmed in as sumptuous drawing-room, as far as the _hoi polloi__ went, at least. Any lefty sticklers who might find a bit too much silver, glass and teak on display there would be placated, when the future-plans question came, by talk of a swift removal to a modest place of one's own and a single half-amused glance about. At this stage he had not yet fully worked out minor finesses like that, but he was a great believer in thinking as far as possible round any subject beforehand.

Now he set out to ingratiate himself with the crew, but circumspectly, not in the style which had been good enough for Emrys on the train. He sensed that a little went a long way with this sort of youngster, especially a little of anything that could be described, however unjustly, as Welsh flannel, Taff bullshit, etc. Having done what he could in this out-of-the-way mode he turned his attention to the interviewer, a fair young man in a wine-coloured jacket who had nothing discoverably Welsh about him and who let it be known, with enviable speed and clarity, that this morning's task was no more than the sort of thing he was prepared to go through with while waiting briefly for a proper job a long way away. In other circumstances Alun would have sorted him out in five seconds flat, but as it was he concentrated on pretending not to have noticed and on not trying to make the young shit like him - that had to come naturally or not at all.

The interview went well enough. Alun soon saw the fellow had no particular approach, was in the manner of such fellows merely concerned to establish his superiority to the overall run of the play. So the angle to go for had to be knowing a lot, seeing a lot, caring a lot but only in unpredictable ways, or ways that could be passed off as unpredictable. It was not an occasion for pulling out the stops, but near the end, after magnanimously letting pass a touch of ignorance about the Attlee governments' policies for industry in South Wales, Alun took the chance of getting into his stride rather.

'It's all too easy for an exile come home to stay where he lands up, to cultivate his garden and never look over the hedge, to become something of a vegetable himself. That won't do for me, I'm afraid. I'll be going out, out in search of Wales, looking at things, looking at people. A small private voyage of discovery. I'm sure I'll find plenty of changes, for the worse, for the better, but there are some places where change can never reach... '

He went on to list, rather fancifully, perhaps, a few of that kind. In the normal way he forgot everything he had said in a broadcast as soon as it was finished, and good riddance - remembering might interfere with spontaneity next time. But now for once some of it stuck. Cultivating his garden he could dismiss right off, as anyone might who· was as keen as he on what you could get up to indoors. In search of Wales, on the other hand, sounded distinctly good, might become _In Search of Wales__ one day; it was a pity that old Brynford had done those programmes so recently. Meanwhile, the pursuit of a nebulous project of this sort would be just the thing for getting him out of untimely invitations and the like, and also covering any sudden disappearances he might feel impelled to make.

When Rhiannon came into the drawing-room after the TV lot had gone, she found him full of enthusiasm for his new scheme, full of ideas too: trips to Courcey Island, to Carmarthen, to Merthyr Dafydd, to Brecon; visits to metal works at Port Holder and Caerhays; rounds of the pubs in Harriston, in Cwmgwyrdd, in Bargemants Row; a pilgrimage and a piss-up in Birdarthur, where Brydan had settled after his last trip to America. As he talked, she moved here and there round the room in an unsettling-way. 'What are you doing? he broke off to ask.

'Nothing. I'm listening. I was just making sure everything is all right.'

'What? How do you mean all right?'

'Just nothing's been broken or anything like that.'

'Don't fuss' he said, but not sharply. 'You tip-toe round this place as if you're afraid to chip a bloody saucer. These blokes are very professional, you couldn't tell they'd been here if you didn't know.'

'All right, but I am afraid to chip a bloody saucer, and so should you be. People get attached to their things. Anyway, how did it go?'

'Uh? _Oh.'__ He tossed his head, indicating that the presumably meant interview was nothing, no trouble, of no significance, already forgotten but satisfactory. 'I was thinking, I thought I might look in at the Glendower for lunch, you know, toe in the water kind of thing. See if it's any good. Why don't you... '

'There's this cleaner turning up, and then Rosemary's train gets in at 2.40,' said Rhiannon, naming their younger, unmarried daughter. Rosemary was taking a long weekend off from St John's College, Oxford, where she was reading law, to come and help her mother look at houses round about. 'Be a bit of a rush.'

'Oh God, four to one again. Still, it's only for a couple of days, I agree.'

'Come on, let's hear it.'

'I told you before and don't pretend you don't know perfectly bloody well in the first place. Any man in the company of two women is outnumbered four to one however amiable they may be. By definition.'

'So when it's just you and me I outnumber you two to one, is that right?'

'Affirmative. And it's not twice two when there are two of you. I mean if we had Frances on the party it would be nine to one. What they call a square law.'

'You will have your little joke, won't you, _was__? And I'll go along and glad to as long as we all know it's a joke. You outnumbered. That'll be the day.'

'Oh now now girl, easy by there, _cariad__,' he said, taking it off wicked of course but getting something out of it at the same time, or fancying so. 'No ruffled feathers now.' He put his arms round her.

'Relax, boyo,' she said.

The family car was Japanese and why not? - Alun would tacitly claim a special Welsh exemption from any lingering sense of duty to drive an 'English' model. It had been brought down from London earlier that week by a minor character from his publishers, minimal in fact and male too, thus rating no more than a gulped-down whisky before being packed off to the station. Today Alun took it into town and parked it in a building contractor's yard just behind Broad Street. A long-nosed man in a yellow helmet came out of a shed as if to order him away, but Alun's face with the distinctive quiff was well enough known to be familiar even when not actually recognized, and a clap on the shoulder and a bellowed but unintelligible greeting did the rest.

The state of play in the grill at the Glendower, half full or more on a weekday lunchtime earlyish, suggested that the concern was doing well enough. It was a big part of Alun's stock-in-trade to seem to know things like what sort of people were sitting at the tables, but he would have tried not to be challenged on this lot. Part of it was that nobody dressed properly any more. Another part was that it was no longer just the young who were too young to be distinguished between. He cast his eye round the room. Tradesmen, he said firmly to himself. Housewives. When he had hung about for a minute or two without anyone coming near him or even looking up, he made for the door, noticing on the way that an attempt, pretty pathetic but not on that account less offensive to respectable sentiment, had been made to give the place a Nineties or Edwardian look with plush, iron, brass, wall-mirrors and long white aprons on the waiters. An ancient map of South Wales (c.1980) hung between the windows.

Upstairs in what was called the cocktail bar there was more of the same: sepia photographs of archaic worthies on the mauve-papered walls and a barman in a striped waistcoat with brass buttons, and not only that. In fact he looked like the sort of girl who might be cast as Toby Belch in a women's-college production of _Twelfth Night__. An older man on the other side of the counter was talking seriously to him, a man with very neat wavy grey hair, a slim figure and uncommonly white whites to his eyes, and in other ways showing himself to be no exception to a rule of Alun's that men over fifty who took care of themselves were not to be trusted. This one was readily placeable as Victor Norris and he turned and so introduced himself with impressive speed, going on with more of the same to order Alun a drink. Then he did a buttering-up job on Alun that was a good deal more efficient than might have been expected in a restaurant in a provincial town, even a Welsh one. When it seemed to be over Alun said, 'Expecting Char1ie in, are you?'

Victor scratched the side of his neck, bending his hand back to do so further than some men might, and glanced at the grandfather clock that clunked near by. 'If he's coming he should be here any minute.'

'He told me he usually turns up midday.'

'Yes, he feels at home here. Which is nice for everyone.'

'I should have thought he felt at home in most places with a licence.'

'M'm.' Victor smiled with closed lips. 'Of course he is very outgoing. But behind that, oh dear, there's a very different kind of person. You wouldn't - you haven't seen that.'

'What haven't I seen?' asked Alun, who had found himself beginning to come round fast after the soft-soap session. 'I have known him for quite a few years, actually.'

'Oh, indeed you have, he often speaks of you. But that poor man my brother is vulnerable to all sorts of pressures and more than a lot of people he needs a settled, undisturbed kind of existence. I dare say you think that sounds silly but it's true.'

'Really.'

'Yes really.' At this point Victor took a silent message from somebody in the doorway, doubtless the friend one heard about, and in a flash his manner changed from faint menace all the way back to full warmth. 'No rest for the wicked. Super to have met you - Alun. Oh you are lunching?: Do you like scallops?'

When Alun had said truthfully that he did, Victor held his hand out palm foremost, interdicting further speech, and strode rather mannishly away. Back at the bar Alun got another drink but had his money refused, and his respect for Victor' went up another notch. Time was getting on, however. He looked round as he had downstairs: more tradesmen and housewives, a fairly unselfconscious sample. Just as he was starting to contemplate listlessly a solo lunch with perhaps bits of Victor thrown in, Charlie appeared. He was followed by someone who at first looked to Alun like an incredibly offensive but all too believable caricature of Peter Thomas aged about eighty-five and weighing half a ton. At a second glance he saw that it was Peter Thomas.

All three men seemed to turn rigid for an instant, then came back to life and motion. Alun raised his glass high, Charlie waved, Peter nodded. They converged. Alun shook Peter's hand not too hard, smiling not too broadly, trying to get it right. The difficulty was, he recognized, that he had grown so used to transmitting amiability, benevolence and all those for unreal that this confrontation rather stretched him. His will was of the best: he had a rooted and sincere aversion to any trouble not of his own making.

'Don't let's think how long it's been,' he said to Peter, genuinely enough. 'Now drinks.' While these were coming he went on, nodding at Peter's paunch, 'I don't know how you do it. I suppose it's just a matter of eating and drinking anything you like.'

'Yes, but it's the slimline tonic that turns the scale.

Actually I have managed to reduce the rate of increase of the rate of increase.'

'Nice-looking place, this,' said Alun to Charlie, his glance panning to and fro. 'They won't let me pay here, I notice.'

'Oh, you've seen Victor.'

'_Yes__,' said Alun, enthusiastically this time. 'Impressive fellow, I thought. He knows his job all right. Very professional. '

Charlie seemed rather doubtful of that one, but then raised his glass. 'Here's to us all. Welcome to Wales, you poor bastard.'

The three looked one another seriously in the eye and drank with a flourish. Alun began to relax. He went on relaxing over the next drink, when they got on to politics and had a lovely time seeing who could say the most outrageous thing about the national Labour Party, the local Labour Party, the Labour-controlled county council, the trade unions, the education system, the penal system, the Health Service, the BBC, black people and youth. (Not homosexuals today.) They varied this with eulogies of President Reagan, Enoch Powell, the South African government, the Israeli hawks and whatever his name was who ran Singapore. They were very much still at it when they went down to lunch, or rather when Charlie, explaining that he was trying to keep himself down to just one meal in the evening, went and sat with the other two and prepared to drink while they had lunch. He had brought a fresh drink with him from the bar so as to ensure an even flow.

They had hardly settled in their seats before one of the long-aproned waiters went round unfolding napkins and spreading them across their destined laps. They were unexceptionably large and laundered and of linen, but they were also pale pink. Alun ostentatiously held his arms up well clear during the spreading. When it was over he put on an eager, didactic expression and said, 'This is called a napkin. Its purpose is to protect your clothing from the substantial gobbets of food that your table manners will cause to fall from your mouth or from some point on the way to your mouth, and to provide something other than your hand or sleeve with which to wipe your mouth. Explaining this to one of your understanding would take a long time and even then might not avail, so fucking well sit still and shut up.'

'Oh Christ,' said Peter immediately, his eyes on the menu. They had each been given one in the bar but none of them had looked at it. 'A bloody Welsh lunch and dinner. Well, roll on.' Looking round for someone to accuse he caught sight of Charlie. 'What's the idea?' he asked, apparently in sincere puzzlement.

'You have to do it in a way,' said Charlie. 'People are getting to expect it. We only do it on Fridays anyway, Fridays and St David's Day. And it isn't compulsory even then. Which is decent of us because it's pretty nasty, unless you happen to have a taste for chicken in honey.'

'You mean you actually get people eating that?' asked Alun.

'Not much, no. That's not really the point. Seeing it on the menu is what they like. Same with the signposts.'

'But you don't give an English translation here,' said Peter.

'Well, you see, that would rather spoil things for them.

They like to feel they understand it, or could if they paid it a bit of attention. And they probably do understand some of it, like _pys__ is peas and _tarws__ is taters.'

'Christ,' said Peter again, with weary disgust this time. 'We're not going to war over this, I hope. It's all fairly harmless, isn't it?'

'No it isn't. There you're wrong. It's one part, a small part but still a pan, of an immense Chinese wall of bullshit that's, I mean Offa's Dyke that's... '

'Threatening to engulf us,' supplied Charlie. 'I know.

But I'm afraid I don't think putting a couple of dozen Welsh words on a menu lets the side down very far. Find a pass that's really worth holding and I'll join you there.'

'There never is one. That's the trouble.'

'We need more drinks,' said Alun. 'And I'd advise you to switch, Peter. I don't think that slimline tonic agrees with you.'

'Can I recommend the soup?' asked Charlie. 'I hope you've noticed it's called soup, not _cawl__. I might even have some myself. Potato and leek today, he does it quite well. Unless Peter thinks the leek is there for impure reasons.'

'All right, Charlie; said Peter.

Just as they had ordered, Victor approached the table, using a much less emphatic gait than when making his exit from the bar. 'Do forgive me, but one of your fans, Alun, requests the honour of a brief word.'

'What kind of fan?'

'Well, I don't know what you'd call her, but if it was left to me I'd say she was a young person. There, over in the corner, just turning round now.'

From what Alun could see without his glasses, which was all he was going to see of her, the fan looked perhaps rather good as well as young. 'All right, but you will see she knows I'm having a little private lunch-party.'

'I'll make sure she understands that, Alun - leave it to me.'

'You more or less have to do it,' said Alun after a moment. He felt a little embarrassed.

'Don't worry,' said Charlie.

'I mean you can always get out of it if you don't mind looking like a shit but I'm afraid I'm a bit too cowardly to do that unless I have to.'

'We understand.'

Seen closer to, the fan looked quite seriously good, and late twenties. Alun found himself signalling to Victor, who with what could have been piss-taking alacrity sent a waiter scurrying forward with a fourth chair. The fan shook hands nicely with them all and accepted a-glass of wine.

'And what can I do for you?' There was no point, Alun considered, in trying to hide his satisfaction at this turn of events.

'I'd like you to talk to my group.'

'Tell me about your group.'

It turned out to be a literary circle, thirty strong on a good night, though naturally there would be more for someone like him, twenty minutes' drive, and not worth asking about a fee. Yes, a reading would do if he preferred it.

'I'll consider it,' said Alun. 'Perhaps you'd like to drop me a line incorporating all that, care of the local BBC. Very kind of you to ask.'

'Nice to have met you.' Her voice was good too.

Charlie watched her go. 'Is that the lot?' he demanded.

'The lot? I might talk to her group if I'm feeling gracious.

What are you getting at?'

'What? A bit off I call that quite frankly.'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'I mean, is that the worst you could do? You didn't even ask her for her bloody phone-number.' Charlie shook his head.

'Oh, I read you now. What I should have done was grab at her bosom. Of course.'

'Well that's how you're supposed to behave, isn't it?'

'You do me too much honour, Charlie. Age comes to us all.'

The fresh drinks arrived, whisky and gin to make up for the relative thinness of the wine. Soon afterwards the scallops arrived, and they were all right, eatable enough anyway for Alun to praise them extravagantly when Victor came to inquire. At this stage too Alun carried his point that he must be allowed to pay for the meal or would feel inhibited in his choice, and Victor gave in very gracefully and accepted a glass of the second bottle of Chablis _grand Cru__. For obvious reasons Alun made rather a thing of not knowing about wine, but any fool could have seen that this one looked and sounded good. At a suitable moment he revealed that he had done television that morning, hence, he said, his desire to get clean away afterwards and have a couple of drinks with a pal or two. He added that that was how ht: always felt after a do like that, even a little local one.

'You must have done a lot of it in London,' said Charlie.

'Yes I did, and why not? Some of the people up there, you know, bloody intellectuals, Hampstead types, they look down their noses at you if you go on the box more than once in a blue moon. Cheapening yourself. Well I'm not. I don't consider I'm cheapening myself by appearing on television. What else am I fit for? I'm just an old ham after all, so why shouldn't I perform where a few people can see me?'

'Oh, come along now, Alun, really,' said Charlie at once, and Peter said, 'No, you're not being fair to yourself.'

'You're very kind, both of you, but I've no illusions after all these years. Quite a successful ham, mind, but a ham none the less. An old fraud.' Here he paused for a space, as if wondering whether this time he had indeed been to some extent unfair to himself, then went buoyantly on, 'Anyway, forget it. Bugger it. Now who's for cheese? And it must follow as the night the day, a glass of port.'

Charlie said yes to that instantly, and it only took Peter a moment or two to do so. Alun asked for the cheeseboard, two large vintage ports and a glass of the house red, explaining that-port had been playing him up a bit recently, and went off to the lavatory with more explanations about being an old man and envying you youngsters.

'We chimed in all right, did we?' asked Charlie. 'About the terrible injustice he was doing himself.'

'We did the best we could. Does he think we think he means that about him being a ham and a fraud? Him seeing himself in that light, that is.'

'I don't know. I doubt it. I shouldn't be surprised if he reckons that just saying that, whatever we make of it, is going to help his credibility in the future. Sort of, a fraud who's come out is more believable than a closet fraud.'

'Maybe. Anyway, he's buying us an excellent lunch.

Well, buying me one.'

'There's always that. And it may go against the grain to admit it, but one's spirits do tend to lift a degree or so at the sight of him.'

'I know what you mean. Even I know.'

Alun came hurrying back as the drinks were being handed round by a wine-waiter who came out of the same sort of drawer as the barman and was got up in a fancy jacket with clusters of grapes depicted on the lapels. The cheese was there. Charlie took a small piece of Cheddar.

'What is the vintage port?' asked Alun.

'Port is a fortified wine from Portugal,' said the waiter, having perhaps misheard slightly, 'and vintage port is made from-'

'I didn't ask for a bloody lecture on vinification, you horrible little man.' Alun laughed a certain amount as he spoke. 'Tell me the shipper and the year and then go back to your hole and pull the lid over it.'

The lad seemed more or less unabashed at this. 'Graham 1975, sir,' he said in his Ruritanian accent, and withdrew. 'It's no use just relying on respect to get good service in a restaurant,' Alun explained, still grinning. 'There has to be fear too.'

'Perhaps it slipped your mind that I'm part-owner here,' said Charlie.

'Not at all, that's why I piped up. I could see it would have been difficult for you to say anything. '

'Excuse me a moment.' Charlie got up with deliberation and made off after the wine-waiter.

Alun watched him cross the room in an all-but-straight line, then turned purposefully to Peter and looked him in the eye. 'Gives me a chance to tell you this. What happened many years ago is over and done with as far as I'm concerned. For what that may be worth. I have no unfriendly feelings towards you at all. You'll want to hear about Rhiannon's feelings from her, and forgive me if I intrude, but as far as I know they're the same. I'll never say anything more on the matter.'

'That's generous of you, Alun.' Peter had dropped his gaze. 'Thank you.'

'One moderately interesting thing did emerge from that rubbishy TV chat this morning. It occurred to me while I was yammering away that it might be fun to take a few trips round the place.'

Here Charlie came back and sat down, again in commendable style. 'Keeping staff is a hell of a problem these days,' he said. His manner was conciliatory.

'I bet it is,' said Alun warmly, and went on in the same breath, 'I was just telling Peter I was thinking of going on a jaunt or two in the next few weeks, nothing fancy, a sort of scenic pub-crawl really. With, you know, some eventual literary creation held distantly in mind. Even a poem or two if the bloody old Muse can still walk.'

Charlie and Peter looked at each other. 'It's an idea,' admitted Charlie.

'Bit miserable, running about here and there on your own. Perhaps you two would like to come along sometimes if you're at a loose end. We might get hold of old Malcolm. Make a 'party of it.'

In those few seconds the expressions of the other two had solidified, Charlie's into cheerful mistrust, Peter's into surly mistrust. The mistrust was natural enough, but out of place on this occasion. Alun liked company, he liked an audience and he liked almost any kind of excursion and that was it. For the moment at least. When he protested some of this his hearers soon started to cave in, not so much out of belief as because each calculated that any attempt at hanky-panky could be better resisted nearer the point of unveiling, and after all it had been a pretty lavish lunch. And what else had they got in their diaries?

Charlie was the first to yield. Peter held out a little longer, declaring that he would have to see, maintaining that he was supposed to be taking things easy, but he was talked out of that in no time when it was explained to him that getting out and about a bit was just what he needed. All the camaraderie that had rather faded away over the wine-waiter was restored. Animatedly they suggested places to visit, discussed them, reminisced about them. Alun ordered two more large vintage ports and another glass of the house red, which he sipped at and seemed to lose interest in. After a few minutes he called for the bill, paid, tipped largely, and departed on his way - to take the car in and have its starter fixed, he said.


4


But when Alun reached his car and set about driving off, the engine fired in a couple of seconds, nor did he go near any garage or repair-shop before parking the machine at the side of the road in a smart residential area. There followed a brisk walk of a hundred yards to a short driveway, at whose entrance he abruptly checked his stride. Standing quite motionless he gazed before him with a faraway look that a passer-by, especially a Welsh passer-by, might have taken for one of moral if not spiritual insight, such that he might instantly renounce whatever course of action he had laid down for himself. After a moment, something like a harsh bark broke from the lower half of his trunk, followed by a fluctuating whinny and a thud that sounded barely organic, let alone human. Silence, but for faint birdsong. Then, like a figure in a restarted film, he stepped keenly off again and was soon ringing the bell in a substantial brick porch.

Sophie Norris came to the door in a biscuit-coloured woollen dress and looking very fit. As soon as she had taken in the sight of Alun her routine half-smile vanished. 'You've got a bloody nerve you have, Alun Weaver,' she said in the old penetrating tones. 'I've a good mind to slam this in your face, cheeky bugger.'

'Ah, but you're not going to, are you, love? And why should you anyway? Just dropped in for a cup of tea. Nothing wrong in that, is there?'

Sighing breathily and clicking her tongue, she gave way. 'Ten minutes, mind. Ten minutes max. I've got to go down the shop. Think yourself bloody lucky I hadn't left already.'

'Sure. Charlie not about then?'

There Alun overplayed his hand a little. 'What do you take me for, Weaver, a fucking moron?' she said more indignantly than before, her eyes distended. 'Do you think I don't know you'd never dream of showing your nose here unless you were absolutely certain he wasn't around? You sod.'

'Come on, only joking. Yes, as a matter of fact I've just come from the Glendower. Peter was there too. The three of us had a spot of lunch. Quite good it was. All right if I sit down?'

She conceded this with an ill grace. 'Why didn't you say something the other night at the Morgans'? Or you could have just picked up the - '

'I didn't get the chance. No, no, that's not true. I probably could have. I didn't happen to think of it then.'

'And when did you happen to think of it, may I ask?'

'Well... this morning. Can't remember what time.

One moment nothing could have been further from my mind and the next I was full of it.'

'And you reckon you can just turn up like this, out of the bloody blue?'

'You could always chuck me out. I'd go quietly. You know that.'

'Still the same old Alun, eh?'

'Pretty much, yeah.' He paused. 'Go for a drive, shall we?'

This· apparently innocent invitation held overtones for them that resounded from thirty years or more back, when their drives had taken them to a convenient spot behind the mental home, in better weather to the woods on the far side of the golf links and occasionally to the Prince Madoc out at Capel Mererid, in whose snug they had more than once behaved in a fashion that had never quite ceased to perturb Alun in retrospect, even today.

'No need,' said Sophie in reply. Her manner was still faintly tinged with resentment. 'There won't be anyone along.'

'What makes you so sure?'

'I'm sure.'

'Yes, but what makes you so sure?'

'I'll tell you later.'

'No, tell me now.'

'All right,' she said. 'When Victor puts him in a taxi he always gives me a ring to let me know. Because once when he stayed very late he pitched up passed out on the stool thing in the passport-photo booth at Cambridge Street station. And it just so happened that old Tudor Whittingham was on his way back from London and spotted him and fetched him home in a taxi, another taxi. He couldn't even remember being put into the first taxi.'

Alun pondered. 'But Victor giving you a ring won't stop him pitching up passed out at the station or anywhere else, will it?'

'No, but it sort of hands over the responsibility, see. I can understand it.'

'Oh, and I can. What does Victor think? About how that arrangement might, er, have a bearing on your own plans for, er, whatever it might be.'

'I don't know. I don't know what any of them think.'

'Who does? Has it come in handy before?'

'If I ever tell you that it's bloody going to be later.'

'Has that arrangement with Victor come in handy before?' he asked later.

'Do you consider you have the slightest right to expect me to answer that?'

'Absolutely not and absolutely none. Presuming on an old friendship.'

'You are a bugger. Well, sort of, just from time to time. Not ridiculous. Not like when... '

'No, of course not. How much does he know?'

'Same as ever, the whole score and nothing at all.'

'I'd say you and he have a pretty good life together on the whole.'

'I don't know about together exactly, but yes, we do really. Most afternoons while he's in town I'm down the shop.'

'Yes, the serviceable shop. I remember well. What do you actually do there?'

'I look at a pattern-book occasionally, and friends come in, and I drink a lot of coffee. I do about as much as he does at the Glendower. All quite relaxed. He knew all about me when he married me, of course. Well, quite a lot about me.'

'You two haven't been married all that terrifically long, have you?'

'No, Not what you'd call terrifically long, only twenty-two years.'

'Good God, is it that much?' said Alun absently. 'Well now, you've never had children, have you? I suppose that's... '

'Just as well and no one could have put it clearer, and quite right too. You've forgotten, you've only just remembered I've always never had children. I don't know, some men would have done their homework before they barged in for a quick snuggle, or at least a bit of bloody revision.' She was dodgy again for a moment. 'How's your life then?'

'Fine. Never changes.'

'Oh? In that case I suppose you'll be looking up a few old friends round the neighbourhood. Like a couple of dozen. Always been like that with you, hasn't it?'

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